Soul Hackers

Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers Developer: R&D1 Publisher: Atlus RPG - Sega Saturn Hard Drive Backup - 3 Saves 1 player

My first experience with the long-running Shin Megami Tensei RPG series just happens to be a sequel to one of the spinoffs by the name of Devil Summoner. It's been sitting in my collection for over ten years now and this summer, I was determined to give it a fair shake. Being a spinoff, Soul Hackers take some liberties in the game systems compared to entries in the traditional SMT line. Nevertheless, I've been hearing about the latest title, Shin Megami Tensei Strange Journey, and although it sports some additions to the battle system, a lot of the other stuff seems similar to Soul Hackers. So this is a good of a representation as any.

Soul Hackers takes place in a futurustic cyberpunk city, where a mega corporation is piloting its virtual reality world Paradigm-X on the populace. Meanwhile, the main character of the story, and his girl-next-door friend Hitomi are in a hacker group called "Spookies". As they go about their business, a mysterious entity named Redman keeps showing up, and tries to appeal to the main character. Redman seems to know a lot more about the main character than the main character knows about him. Along the way, Redman puts the Main Character in trances and allows him to experience "Vision Quests", the lives of people who have gone before. What do these vision quests have to do with hacking and where does VR fit into all this?

The style of game is similar to what you'd find in other jRPGs. There's a single city, with multiple areas where you can go shopping, talk to people, and enter dungeon-buildings. Consequently, there is also the virtual reality world, Paradigm-X, which is much smaller, and much uglier. The shops in the game will update their inventory as you reach certain story points, so it's rather efficient.

Visually, Soul Hackers is extremely slick. I personally was in love with the entire art direction, visual effects, and atmosphere. One technique that they pulled off really well was transitioning prerendered backgrounds into FMV and back. It's not completely smooth, as the FMV is at a lower resolution, but the overall effect was something that really complemented the unique look of this game. The first person 3D wasn't as nicely looking, I'll have to admit. Still, the look and feel was one of the biggest draws for me.

Soul Hackers retains many of the integral components that make up a Shin Megami Tensei game. The biggest feature that defines SMT is the interaction with demons. Demons are your random encounter opponent in the game, and there are a lot of different types, with their own sets of skills. But they can be convinced to join your party, and fused together to form new and more powerful demons. It's a very interesting concept, and one that has some critical consequences. First off, there's the negotiation. When you encounter a demon in battle, one of your menu options is TALK. A demon will either ask you a question, or will make a comment and ask you your opinion on it. Depending on how you respond and the demon's disposition towards you, the demon will:

• Join your party
  
• Ask you another question
  
• Ask you to give it something
  
• Give you something
  
• Respond to your answer
  
• Leave
  
• Leave with all the enemies
  
• Become angry, and their entire party will get a free attack on you
  

Some of the major influencers of outcome depends not only on your response but whether you have any negotiation booster items equipped, the alignment of your current group (a lawful demon will refuse to join your group if you have a chaotic demon in your active party), the level of your main character, and even the phases of the moon! This adds a unique experience to fighting battles because sometimes you may want to simply recruit a specific monster in order to talk your way out of battles with them in the future. It's a completely valid strategy, and one I've used to get out of some tricky situations.

But it doesn't stop there. Because of the fusion system, recruiting takes on a different meaning than simply adding a body to your lineup. Fusing two demons together generally means that you'll get a superior demon, and often the new demon will take on some special skills from the demons you used to fuse. So that means that even if you could recruit the demon later, the fused version could potentially have more abilities. Unfortunately, it isn't as easy as simply selecting the abilities you want to pass down, so if you want a specific ability on your new demon, you have to attempt to fuse to get the preview demon, and check to see if it's in its list of abilities. That guessing and checking isn't a huge burden, but the interface could have been better improved. I have to admit that I'm not really a fan of fusion in general. It's like the tedious version of the alternative, which is simply to get the end result in the first place. A lot of games are worse because of it, but I suppose that due to the skill inheritence, it has some value in Soul Hackers.

One of the liberties that the Devil Summoner series took is by giving each demon a loyalty rating. In Soul Hackers, each demon has a personality. If you command the demon in battle according to its personality (ie ATTACK with an Violent Type), you build their loyalty. But if you command them to do other things, they might just lose loyalty. You can also give a demon gifts outside of battle to raise loyalty. Once they are maxed out, though, you can command them to do anything and they won't lose loyalty. Whether this is a good or bad subsystem is open to debate, but I'm told it's implemented much much better in Soul Hackers versus the original Devil Summoner. Of course, one of the perks of this loyalty system is that when maxed out, enemies will get some bonuses. The Violent demon will hit harder at max loyalty. Friendly demons will take a hit for you when they're maxed out. For some reason the Crafty demon can be transformed into useful and not-so-useful items at maximum loyalty.

What I find most pleasing about the game isn't this demon stuff, but its core combat. It is similar to the basic setup of Dragon Quest where your actions really do matter. Step into a new area with unfamiliar demons and you could see Game Over easily. Even facing off against previously encountered demons could result in the same fate, if you're not paying attention. Buffs and debuffs matter. Elemental affinities matter. Weapon types matter. As I played more of Soul Hackers, I realized that what I enjoyed about having to exploit weaknesses in FFX was done in SMT first. Perhaps the main difference is that in FFX, you yourself did not really have weaknesses, but here in SMT, your demons most certainly do. Just as you can dominate the enemies you face with the right mix of party members and actions, you can most certainly -be- dominated with the wrong mix of members, or wrong decisions. It's a tough lesson to learn in this game, and one I've had to learn many many times.

Another unique aspect in Soul Hackers that wasn't in pre-Strange Journey SMT titles, is the ability to customize your computer. Here, you can load it up with applications that allow you better negotiating skills with demons, to present a full time minimap on the main screen, to help assist with fusions on-the-go, the ability to save anywhere, stuff like that. There are only six slots, and some of the applications cost more than one slot. There's usually only one or two locations within dungeons, where you can switch out these applications, so you have to choose wisely.

I have to cite some faults though. Being a SMT newbie, I felt as if Soul Hackers was really overwhelming in a lot of ways. When you attempt to fuse demons, you are shown a preview of the new demon and their skills. But all you have is the name of their skill, with no description as to what they do. I'm told that this is because most SMT players are familiar with the abilities, but I don't think it could have hurt Atlus to include descriptions. I had to pretty much fuse, rotate the new demon in my party, and then use the ability in battle in order to see what it actually did. Coincidentally, it is also the only time the game gives you any kind of description at all: when you're about to use it. What's also overwhelming is how many ways you can use demons. You can use demons to fuse up to new demons. You can use demons to upgrade the special demon you're given in early game. You can use Crafty-type demons to transform into items once it hits max loyalty. And mid-game, you can transform demons into weapons as well. I imagine if you are a SMT veteran, you know which demons are good to keep, and which ones would be good as one of these other things. But it's a bit much for a first-timer. I suppose that's my fault for starting with Soul Hackers.

Another thing that's really bad is the battle speed. I played almost the entire game with animation turned off, because battles would take forever. But even with animation off, it's still very sluggish. In addition, it seems odd to complain about this because I otherwise love the battle system, but sometimes I find deaths to be really cheap. You enter a new area and this one enemy casts an insta-kill spell or a stone spell on your main character. Game Over. I'm open to challenges but I question some of these situations. Make no mistake, I died, and I died a lot in this game. Most of the time, it was fair - I made poor decisions. Other times, the game was just plain evil. And what's up with those ridiculous 8 hour long end game dungeons?

But I genuinely do love the artistic direction that Soul Hackers employs. The story and atmosphere was so different from anything I'd played in the past, that I was completely captivated through and through. This is also the first and only RPG I can think of where random encounters actually make sense. And the one feature I love from the battles, aside from its awesome weakness exploitation, is the fact that the game remembers which commands you previously inputted. When you start your turn, your cursor is already on the previous command you did for each character. Not only that, but there's an Auto-Battle feature where "REPEAT" is an option. This is genuinely one of the most user-friendly things I wish would be on every turn based RPG.

Solid and intriguing. I'd love to see how newer versions of Shin Megami Tensei turns things up a notch.

Culdcept DS

Culdcept DS Developer: Omiya Soft Publisher: SEGA CCG/Board Game - Nintendo DS Battery Backup - 1 Save 1 player / 2-4p Nintendo WiFi

Although Culdcept isn't a familiar title to most gamers, it has been growing a faithful fanbase since its original release on the Sega Saturn, and subsequent Playstation port. I was first exposed to the series through the Dreamcast sequel and was completely smitten by its brilliance. A small print run of the PS2 port (of Culdcept II) was the first time that English speakers got the chance to play it. More recently, Culdcept Saga became one of the earlier releases for the XBOX360. Where does that bring us? Back to the beginning.

Culdcept can be best described as Monopoly meets Magic the Gathering. You take turns rolling dice and moving your piece around a board. If you find a vacant space, you can occupy it by summoning a creature. If an enemy lands on it, they pay you a toll. Upgrade your property, and the toll goes up. So the overall structure is very similar to Monopoly. What's unlike Monopoly is that games don't take 12 hours to finish. Although you could win by bankrupting other players, the main objective of each board is reaching a certain mana amount and then "pass Go" to end the game.

The Magic the Gathering part comes in the details. There's deck construction, creature summoning, "sorceries", "instants/interrupts", and even a system comparable to obtaining card packs. You begin the game with a starter pack of 50 cards. But you can gain additional cards just by playing. Regardless of whether you win or lose a match, you will gain new cards. This ensures that even when you've spent an hour on a map, but end up in last place, you wouldn't have wasted your time, because you benefit just from playing the game. I believe you do get more / rarer cards when you win though. All in all, there's over 370 cards contained within. It's important to read and understand all the cards you have and see if there are any card combinations that could maximize to your advantage. The enjoyment comes from creating a workable strategy with the cards you have. It has all the elements of any good Collectable Card Game and that's why I love it so.

What makes the game interesting is the back-and-forth transferring of land. Whereas in Monopoly, you own property until you sell it, here you only own a square on the board if one of your summoned creatures is placed there. Summoning costs gold, and may require other conditions as well. If an opponent lands on your square, they don't immediately pay you the value of the square. They can instead choose to fight your creature by summoning their own creature. That brings up the battle phase where you and your opponent can each play up to 1 skill card from your hand to influence the outcome. Each creature has its own Strength/Hit Point rating, special abilities and casting cost. Skill cards can add bonuses to those stats, or provide additional effects, such as giving attack priority to the defender instead of the attacker. If the attacking player wins the battle, they now become the owner of the square. If the attacking player loses, they pay the toll. So there's an added intensity because the fights make the game much more dynamic.

There's a lot of other components to the game in addition to the basics. For instance, both creatures and land can be neutral or have an element. A water creature on water will gain defensive bonuses. These defensive bonuses will grow when you upgrade the land. Upgrades can be costly, but they're necessary to help you keep possession of your land through the defense bonuses and will drive up the cost of the toll, putting you closer to winning the match. A mismatch of creature element and land element will forfeit all the defense bonuses. So another option is the ability to swap out an existing creature of yours on the board with one from your hand, but it requires some conditions, costs additional gold for summoning the new creature and takes up a turn, which may or may not pay off. That's just scratching the surface of some of the strategic depth in the game.

Since this is the ten year anniversary, Omiya Soft went back to basics for the celebration. Culdcept DS is an enhanced port of the original Saturn game, but with rules from the later games, some new cards, and a rebalancing of the old cards. The developers added in a few extras too, such as art galleries and medals that you get when you achieve certain goals. It pretty much plays exactly like the Culdcept II I have for Dreamcast, but that's a good thing. The DS format is better for this type of game though, because the presentation is simple, the online component costs nothing, and you can play it anywhere. There's a story mode where you face off against 2-3 computer opponents. Of course any story for a board game is pretty silly, and this is no different. But it does give a progressive set of challenges. There's also a versus mode, where you can play against computer or against friends in the area or against random people through Nintendo WiFi. Culdcept is a completely satisfying mesh of board game and CCG that somehow just works.

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride
RPG - Nintendo DS
Battery Backup - 3 Saves
1 player / WLAN Knick-Knack Exchange

Dragon Quest IV-VI make up a trilogy, but the starting point of V occurs a bit in the future compared to the events of IV. The games are tied by having the same worldview and history, rather than an immediate continuity. As the first DQ I've played since the first NES game, Chapters of the Chosen was a pleasant surprise. The actual game was solid, with meaningful battle choices, a healthy dose of exploration, a pleasant story, and charming interactions with townsfolk. I was worried that Hand of the Heavenly Bride would be too similar to enjoy, but were my suspicions unfounded?

As expected, when I first started playing DQV, it was a bit disappointing. It's not that the game was bad, but since DQIV did such a good job of everything already, V seemed completely unnecessary. The story is a bit different, focusing on the adventures of one particular person rather than a variety of heroes. This is handled in a different way than most RPGs, because the main hero is completely central, and will diverge paths from other characters he partners with. So the premise is fresh, and is entertaining in its own right. Other than that though, the games are remarkably similar. The only gameplay difference from DQIV -> V is the addition of the ability to recruit monsters and have them as party members. The spells you can choose and even most of the equipment is carry-over, so I was completely convinced that V was the same as IV.

As I played on, it finally hit me. V isn't the same as IV at all. In fact, there are a few areas where V is clearly -worse- than IV.

Most people seem to notice instantly that the musical composition isn't as good as its predecessor. The tunes are less memorable and aren't interesting enough to listen to apart from the game.

Worse than that is that poor continuity in the story. One of the major things in the game is that you have a choice of a marriage partner. Depending on who you marry, I presume people will talk to you differently and events will play out according to your choice, which is quite nifty and helps you feel like you're a part of the game world. What isn't as cool are the huge gaps in dialog-logic, like when my wife goes missing for years on end, and her family never even talks to me about that? It's those gaps that really ruin the otherwise convincing situations these characters are in.

Worser still are the design decisions that handicap the gameplay. One thing that I loved about DQIV DS, and Grandia for that matter, is that you're able to rotate the camera and designers will hide things so that they're only visible from certain angles. In DQIV, some of the mini-medals and other objects were obscured in the default view, but rotating the camera can reveal their presence. The rotating camera felt integrated into the game. Not so with DQV. You can rotate, but there's no point to it all. To be fair, there are some doors and ladders that can only be seen if you rotate the camera, but other than the 2-3x in the game where that occurs, the rotation feature is simply tacked-on. Because of that, I felt as if the exploration of dungeons and towns was far less interesting.

Also the ability to recruit monsters is completely mangled by its sloppy execution. First of all, it has the same problem as other monster-recruiting RPGs. You get a monster, and you have no idea if that monster is actually any good. Just like regular characters, they will gain spells and skills at certain levels. So maybe a monster sucks at low level, but at a certain point, they acquire this one awesome spell. But how do you know? You don't. So you end up grinding that monster and possibly maxing them out to see just how useful/useless they really are. You might level a char up to 30 and find out you've wasted all your time, since their final stats are weak and they lack good abilities. I fail to see how this adds any enjoyment.

Second, the interface to manage your party is clunky. You can only carry 8 characters with you (and use 4 in battle). So you can have your main hero, and 7 monsters if you'd like. Or 5 characters and 3 monsters. Or whatever combination of people/monsters you want. Only problem is... you can only change people in one town in the game. Monsters are similar, although there are about 3 locations in the game where you can swap them in and out. Unless you go to these specific locations, you are stuck with your current cast, and the other characters left behind will not gain any experience.

Finally, the funniest part of all is how you recruit monsters in the first place. It's essentially random! Whereas in SMT games an enemy might talk with you and your response might convince them to join you or in Pokemon, you beat down on an enemy and then toss a pokeball to capture them, here in DQV, you don't do anything. You simply kill enemies and maybe 1 out of 200 enemies you kill might randomly join your party. I've never seen anything so stupid.

Dragon Quest V confirmed my doubts about the series being able to sustain my interest. While I do respect the balanced core gameplay and the lively towns, DQV does nothing to improve on what DQIV already did. In some cases, the design decisions make it a bit worse. I will likely pick up VI just to finish off the trilogy, but I am absolutely convinced that if I never play another DQ ever again, I wouldn't be missing out.

Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard

Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard
RPG - Nintendo DS
Battery Backup - 3 Saves
1 player

I did not want to try this game. I knew that most of my peers were loving the series, but I have never liked 1st person perspective in RPGs, and do not particularly care for the dungeon crawler / survival RPG genre. And when asking someone whether the only thing cool about the game was that you had to draw your own map, the response was: "Yeah!" I thought that was the dumbest thing ever. Little did I know that it, along with the rest of the game, would be strangely compelling.

The structure of the game is similar to most dungeon crawlers. You have but one town and one multi-tiered "dungeon". The dungeon in question is really a labyrinth within a tree, so instead of drab and worn walls, you encounter lush green forests, autumn leaves, cherry blossoms, and other natural scenery. It's in first person, but there's a really nice level of detail to the environments and their vibrant color schemes. Unlike some other dungeon crawlers, the stages here are not randomly generated. The scenarios are specifically designed, which is a huge plus for me. The game is divided into blocks of 5 floors called strata. Each stratum has its own theme, just like you'd expect from a jRPG. For instance, the ice stages have these frozen tiles where if you walk on them, you slide and are forced along the frozen path until you reach normal ground again. It was the first time I experienced something like that in 1st person.

It's hard to keep focused on your surroundings, though, when there are plenty of hostile beings out there. Most of the enemy encounters occur randomly, but an indicator glows red when one is nearby. There are also visible encounters on every floor with boss/mini-boss type enemies called FOEs. FOE battles are generally extremely tough, to the point where you will want to avoid them at all possible costs. When exploring a floor for the first time, the FOEs can often take you out in a single turn. They can be overcome, as you become more powerful later and revisit, but the first time you see them is typically a death sentence. The majority of the FOEs do not even offer any experience when defeated. The only exception are the bosses in each stratum, who are part of the story. For the non-boss FOEs, the overpowering difficulty and lack of experience points (at least in EO2) means that you'll be intentionally planning your routes so as to avoid them. This is actually an interesting approach because it forces you to watch and monitor FOE movements. Depending on the FOE, they do a lot of different things. Some move in a rote pattern. Others will notice your presence and start following you. Some can move through walls. And others are invisible to your map. Their movements are so varied that even walking around is part of EO2's gameplay.

That's not to say the regular random encounters are a cinch. EO2 proves a challenge from the moment you step into the labyrinth. The enemies do more damage than your typical jRPG. The key to it all is how you configure your party. EO2 gives you a lot of choices. You can create your own roster of characters in one of 12 classes. You can arrange your party to include any five of the characters you create. And then when you level up, you get to choose what skills and/or stat bonuses to level up. You only earn one skill point per level. So if you're investing ten of your skill points in a single skill, that means you.re not investing those ten points in other skills. There is a system of constraints at work. That is both a blessing and a curse. While all the skills are useful in some situations, many are not useful in all situations. So the game could make it very playable or very hard for you depending on what you put your skill points in. The game offers a couple of different ways to alleviate this burden. There is the ability to "Rest" your character, which allows you to redistribute all your skill points. It costs 5 levels, but mid-game, 5 levels is a small price to pay to be able to totally redo your character build. The other option is "Retire", in which you trade in your character for a new character at half your current level. The advantage of retiring is that you will receive both stat and skill point bonuses to your new character, which could make up for essentially losing half your levels. These bonuses depend on how high of a level you were when you retired. A level 99 character receives much nicer bonuses than a character retiring at level 30.

The cool thing about the combat is that because of the skill system and your choice of party members, your actions matter a whole lot. You absolutely cannot mow through the game by simplying selecting FIGHT each round. There is a time for that, and EO2 has an auto-fight command for those easier battles. But a lot of the times, you will be up against enemies that want to slaughter you. So using party buffs, enemy debuffs, elemental weaknesses, binding - anything that will give you an advantage, will be an integral part of winning fights. I find it comparable to Dragon Quest, where your options are simple, but they heavily influence outcomes. The other thing that's nice about the battles are the drops. This being a dungeon crawler, the enemy drops are a key element to the game. When defeated, the enemies will randomly/not-so-randomly drop items depending on how you defeat them. For example, defeating an enemy in the first turn may net you a different type of item than if you defeated them in 5 rounds. Or an enemy may only drop an item if you kill them while they're poisoned. Different situations will net different things. It's not the drops themselves that are noteworthy, but how the game builds its structure around them. You will sell the items you get from defeating enemies to the town store, in exchange for money. Then because the shop now has these new materials, new weapons and armor will be available for purchase. It's a really simple and logical system. So it's always a treat to encounter a new type of enemy, because it means a new kind of item, which'll eventually lead to new types of equipment.

What ties all of the dungeon crawling together is a barebones story about a bunch of guilds attempting to reach this shrine in the sky. So you'll get specific missions sanctioned by the city Duke, all with their own monetary rewards. On the side, you'll get optional quests from the city bar, that'll net you rewards as well. Both the missions and quests have you doing a variety of tasks, such as defeating a certain FOE, investigating a subplot, collecting certain items, or further exploration of the floors. I like that there's a linear structure to it all, and that the quests are based on how far in the dungeon you've gotten.

Then we have the mapping. It sounds odd, but being able to draw your own maps on the touchscreen is quite satisfying. In terms of functionality, having an automap feature would be more efficient. But since EO forces you to draw your own maps, this method is far more interactive. The manual method also has some perks to it, by giving you a variety of icons to utilize, different floor tile colors to use as you wish, and notes you can insert into the map for reference. So while it takes a little more work to set up your map, it pays off because it can contain far more information than an automap could ever produce.

I've come to really appreciate Etrian Odyssey in the way it encourages exploration. The mapping feature is great, but it's only part of the story. Enemies, including FOEs, will drop items, leading to extra money and new equipment. You'll want to explore further just so you can experience the new item drops. Quests will have you looking for a special item, so even though you may have mapped out an entire floor, you'll be exploring the floor again to find the quest item. There will be passageways that are accessible only by certain classes, so if they're not in your party, you will have to revisit. There are special character abilities called Force that builds up like a super meter in fighting games. These abilities are extremely powerful when unleashed, but because they build up slowly, will have you staying in the dungeons longer to build them up. There are things here and there that all push you to hold out a little bit longer, go a little bit further, exactly what a survival RPG should do. Etrian Odyssey excels at luring you into a den of wolves with the promise of cotton candy. While the encounters are difficult, all is not lost if your party does end up getting wiped out. One cool trick is that you're able to save your map progress if you die, so it gives you even more incentive for exploring further and further.

But on the flip side, I'm not as fond of the entire skill system, where your choices determine your fate. With only one additional skill point earned per character level, the way you distribute them among all your skills is of utmost importance. You can't simply throw a point into every available skill, because many skills will not even land until you've maxed them out. For example, if your Poison skill is below level 8, you have like < 50% accuracy. That means you don't really know how good or bad a skill is until you've invested 10 levels into it. You don't build levels quickly in the game, so it's a huge investment. Sure the game offers remedies in the form of Rest and Retire, but it reveals that the skill tree is really unbalanced. I also question some of their character balancing decisions. I haven't found a whole lot of use for the Troubadour class, for instance. Atlus apparently removed the two best abilities from this class from the first EO, and as a result, completely crippled it. You also cannot get around the fact that this game is grindy. Because of your limited choices, you can expand your possibilities by making duplicate versions of the same class to diversify your skills. And you can make characters of different classes as well. But unless you rotate your characters into your main party, they will not gain exp. So the only way to maintain level balance is by constantly switching your characters in and out, and grinding until they're at the appropriate level. I much prefer games where exp is distributed to the entire pool of characters. By making you rotate members, it doesn't make the game any more fun. Just more tedious.

Flaws in the skill system aside, what EO does well, it does better than any other game I've played. Every little aspect encourages you to move forward. Even though difficult enemies threaten every step, traps are scattered throughout the floors and the environments are unknown, you will want to progress. The risk vs. reward is exhilarating. For that reason alone, EO2 is the best example of dungeon crawler I've played to date.

Nintendo DSi

Nintendo DSi
Screen Size: 3.25"
Dimensions: 133mm x 73.9mm x 21.5mm
Weight: 214g
Camera: 0.3 Megapixel (x2)
Photo Quality: 640px x 480px
Inputs: DS games, SD cards

Perhaps the most controversial system launch in modern times, Nintendo answers the questions that no one asked with the DSi. Talking to most people about the system elicits lukewarm responses, or outright anger. The DSi is an "upgrade" to the existing line of dual screen portables that boasts larger screen sizes, the ability to download games and applications off of a new service called DS Ware, 2 cameras, and a SD card slot for storing pictures, music, and DS Ware content. Gone is the GBA hardware slot, which many believe is a crime, and in its place is a bunch of features that actual gamers don't want or need. I sure love controversy, and I've been wanting an excuse to upgrade from the ergonomically painful DS, so here are my thoughts.

Display

The screens are noticeably larger than the old ones. It won't blow anyone away, but they are a nice bonus to the package. Since I didn't own a Lite, the brightness of the display will take a little getting used to. But with five different brightness settings, there's not much worry.

Audio

The speakers are supposed to be much improved this time around, from the DSLite. Although the volume is not loud enough if you wanted to blast your music, the sound comes out pretty clear. One issue I had with the old DS is that at low volumes, there was a lot of distortion, which was one irritation of mine. These issues are gone here. With headphones, the audio comes out pretty nicely as well.

Storage

The slot for SD cards have an interesting design. You have to first swivel the covering, then pull it out a little bit, before inserting the SD card upside down. It snaps in cleanly. The nice thing is that the DSi supports SDHC format, which means as of now, you can have up to 32 GB of storage. That's a huge amount of space. My laptop's harddrive has less storage. One drawback for the DSi is that the DSi cannot plug into your computer in any way. That means if you want to do any file transfers between PC and DSi, you have to have a SD card reader on your PC, remove SD card from DSi, transfer it to the card reader, make your changes, and then put the card back into the DSi. It's inconvenient to have to do it that way, and if you don't already have a reader, you're going to have to buy one.

If you don't want to bother with SD cards, the system comes with 256MB of internal storage.

Once again, these storage solutions are only for photos, music, and DLC for now.

Navigation

In the old DS and DSLite, when you turned on the system, you had 3 options: start up DS game, start up GBA game, or go into system settings. They overhauled the bootup menu so that it's now a horizontal scrolling series of icons that include system settings, camera, starting DS game, music player, etc.

Although some items can be easily navigated with the buttons and D-pad, annoyingly, there are quite a few functions that are touch-screen only.

DSi Shop

From now until October 5, Nintendo is giving away 1000 free DSi Points, if you purchase the system.

I haven't taken advantage of it yet, but I may give Wario Ware Snapped a shot. I did try the DS Ware store for downloading the Opera browser. Unlike the DS/DSLite version, this one is a free download.

The store is organized in several categories, like most popular downloads, downloads searchable by first letter, etc. Then it gives you a brief description of the product, followed by the price in DSi Points. It's not unlike the system used by Microsoft's XBL. Once you download an item, it shows up as an icon in the bootup menu.

I got a chance to fiddle with the Opera browser a little bit. Like the old DS one, it does not support Flash, and sites that use it will cripple and sometimes crash it. But on the plus side, it loads websites much faster than the old browser did. Unfortunately, the browser itself is much simpler with one screen used for navigating the webpage, and the other used for a zoomed-in view.

Cameras

The DSi sports two cameras. The positioning is actually quite clever, with a standard camera, and an internal camera that points back at you for self-portraits. You can switch between the cameras with a button. The major gaffe was only have 0.3 megapixels to work with for both. The pictures look great when displayed on the DS, but transferred to a PC and the picture flaws are glaringly apparent.

On the flipside, I get it. I totally get what Nintendo was aiming at. These gadgets are completely irrelevant to us young adults (or old adults) who have tiny Cybershots and huge hunkering Canon SLRs. What Nintendo has done is brought digital photography to the younger generation. This is pretty evident when you look at the available camera filters on the system. You can add preloaded frames, word bubbles, cat whiskers and ears (thanks to some fancy face-detection tech), coloring, etc. Even though I wouldn't really use these features, I think the wealth of camera options is pretty amazing. It might not be practical to me, but if I were a teen, I'd think it was super-cool.

Example 1 Example 2 Example 3

On the other hand, the cameras may be more crucial than simply taking funny pictures with your teenybopper friends. I've seen videos of Wario Ware Snapped and it uses the face detection features as a method of control. That game tracks your head movements, and your on-screen character reacts accordingly. This opens up a wealth of interactive gaming content, similar to what the Wiimote offers the Wii. Nintendo's Snapped game is just a DLC teaser, but it shows a little bit of the possibilities available to the system. If developers can utilize the camera lens to include motion-detection, can you imagine how amazing a Fatal Frame game could be? I'm really excited at the gameplay possibilities.

Music

The DSi only plays AAC files. It's a mis-step for sure on Nintendo's part. I don't know if they were being cheap or what, but it almost seems backwards for them to offer a music player, but only support a single format that hasn't been universally adopted. I almost think it would have been better to not offer a music player at all.

But after I got over that initial hump, I started to learn more about AACs, and realized they offer better sound quality than mp3, result in smaller file sizes, and require less resources for decoding. So aac is better for players and listeners alike, and totally changed the way I thought about the format. Now I am thinking about ripping all my CDs in aac from now on. But while I've become comfortable with an aac-only player, I still do think it was sheer stupidity (or stubbornness) on Nintendo's part to not support the mp3 standard.

As for the player itself, it recognizes your file folders (up to 7 layers of nesting, in fact!). So you can keep your music organized by artist, by album, all in one folder, however you like. Play options include a host of options like shuffle (folder only), shuffle (all folders, all songs), resume (folder only), resume (song only) etc.

The top screen features the display of the song, showing artist, title, time elapsed, etc. The DSi has support for Japanese tags, which is good for me. There are also a bunch of visualizations available, ranging from standard frequency bars to psychadelic images to Excitebike. The bottom screen has all of the controls, like skip, rewind, play/pause.

The way the DSi handles closing the lid is pretty logical. If you flip it closed, and there are headphones attached, you can continue listening to your songs. If you close it, and there are no headphones attached, ie it's playing audio through speakers, it will enter sleep mode. Unfortunately, Nintendo has not offered any external controls for the music. So if you want to skip a track, you cannot just press L/R. The reason is because L/R is mapped to something else...

Nintendo has added some audio manipulation tools in addition to strict playback. You can add filters like "radio" which adds static and flattens the audio to sound more like mono. My favorite is 8-bit Game which... well... makes your song sound like an 8-bit game. You can also record your own sound effects, and cue up those while a song is playing. And you can change the speed and/or pitch of the song pretty easily with the stylus. But perhaps the most useful of all is the addition of percussion instruments mapped to L and R. While listening to songs, you can tap the L/R buttons to either follow along with the beat or add your own rhythmic freestyle touch. It gives the songs an added layer of interactivity, which can be really cool. L and R are usually different sounds, and you can swap percussion instruments with X/Y, so you have some creative freedom there.

Example 1 Example 2

The only thing about playing music is that it only performs in music player mode. Once you exit, the music stops. That means you cannot listen to music while taking or viewing photos. It also means you can't listen to your music while playing a game.

Odds and Ends

Although Nintendo does not mention this, supposedly some hackers found out that the processor and RAM has been upgraded quite a bit from the DSLite. This could explain why the Opera browser runs so much faster.

Power button functions like modern consoles. That is, you press it, and the system resets. If you want to fully power-down, you have to hold it a few seconds. The advantage of course, is having some sort of reset built-in to the hardware.

The volume used to be handled via a slider in the DS and DSLite. Here, the volume comes in the form of up/down buttons on the side.

Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon

Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon
SRPG - Nintendo DS
Battery Backup - 3 Save
1 player

Funny as it may be, I never played a Fire Emblem game. I missed the entire GBA boat, because I didn't like the fact that only the 2nd and 3rd games were available to an English audience. And I never played the GC/Wii games, because I don't own either system. Luckily, Intelligent Systems thought it was a good idea to remake the very first Fire Emblem, originally on the Famicom. Perfect for someone like me wanting to try out the series.

Intelligent Systems is also very well known for their other strategy series, ____ Wars. I played and enjoyed Advance Wars quite a bit. Although FE could easily be a "RPG" version of Advance Wars, there's quite a few things that make Fire Emblem unique. For one, there is an element of exploration on the grid-based maps. It's not the same type of exploration found in regular RPGs, but there is that sense of mystery. On many of the maps, you'll find shops, towns, and cities. If any of your units enter a town, you'll get some information from the villagers there. Sometimes the information is trivial, and other times, they'll reveal some big hints. If the main character, Marth, enters a city, most of the time, you either acquire an item, or you'll recruit a new character to your party. The only problem is... thieves are able to enter and destroy cities, robbing you of that opportunity. So often times, Marth is racing against the enemy thieves to reach the city first. This definitely adds a new dimension to the standard "destroy the enemy" goals in most RPGs. I see now that FE inspired Yggdra Union in this regard.

Another nicety is the amount of recruiting available. While some games let you go to a tavern and hire/recruit party members for extra help, Fire Emblem integrates the recruiting within the plot. If you're fighting a particular battle, you may be able to acquire new party members by visiting a town with a certain character. There are also times where you're able to recruit an enemy commander if you talk to them with a specific character! There's a logic to it, and it generally involves a relationship with one of the characters. For instance, when you visit a town, the townsperson will say, "I wonder how my brother so-and-so is doing." And if you end up visiting that town with that person, you'll definitely get something out of it. Of course the slight downside to this is that if you don't have a particular character in your present party, you won't be able to gain those benefits. It doesn't bother me, as I consider these interactions a bonus. But there are some anal folk out there that want to be able to do 100% of a game on their playthrough.

As far as the actual tactical gameplay, it's pretty standard stuff. You've got characters in a lot of various classes. FE employs a rock-paper-scissors weapon system with lances > swords > axes > lances. Archers are great against flying creatures. And there are specific weapons that do extra damage against typed units (armored, riders, dragons). Basically there's enough options out there to consider pitting specific units vs opposing units. The weapons in the game have a limited number of uses, which may bother some people. But between the ability to shop for base weapons before battle, being able to find shops on maps with stronger weapons, and acquiring the best weapons through defeating of enemies, the limited nature of weapons never was a problem for me. Plus even with the weaker weapons, you're able to forge bonuses at the armory. I never really utilized forging very much in my playthrough, just because it can be extremely pricey. But if you've got the money, it is a very effective way of obtaining weapon superiority.

One of the things that Fire Emblem is (in?)famous for is perma-death. If any of your characters die, then they don't come back. Ever. I personally kind of like perma-death, because it forces you to be wise in your decision-making. I find that most SRPGs are too easy because it doesn't really matter if a party member dies or not. Them being strict on that helps me to be more careful with how I play. Most players, however, find it to be a frustrating exercise, playing for an hour and then losing a character due to some silly mistake. Don't get me wrong... I get frustrated too. Fire Emblem DS adds several save points within a level to help alleviate the tediousness. I think it's a great feature. I can generally tolerate replaying an hour long level if I made a mistake, but if I keep dying on my replay, things get old really quick. Having the save points reduces the penalty to maybe 15-20 mins of lost time, which is pretty reasonable.

From what I understand, the rock-paper-scissors system and the ability to forge weapons are more recent additions to the Fire Emblem series. So the remake adds these features to the structure of the original game. The remake also sports some slick additions to interface that makes the game easy to work with. For one thing, the game proceeds at a relatively brisk pace. There's no lag time between inputting commands, traversing menus, and executing movement and attacks. You can skip attack animations by hitting the Start button. And you can skip through an entire enemy's turn by hitting Start on the map screen. Another nifty addition is the ability to check an enemy's movement range. You can do that in most SRPGs just by clicking on an enemy unit. But FE DS allows you to select on multiple units to display their combined range, and also the ability to display the range of the entire enemy squad at the press of a button. The game just gives you all the possible options you could want, so you can concentrate on building your strategy.

Thing is... despite all of these positives, I realize that I don't enjoy Fire Emblem. Although I like perma-death, I find that the game is ruined because of the way the game is structured. The only other perma-death game I played is Tactics Ogre Let Us Cling Together. That one is frustrating, but respectably so. I find that when I lose a unit in that game, I deserved it. But here's the key difference. In TO:LUCT, not only does each unit on the map have their turn based on their speed/agility (WT), but because of the WT system, you have some control over when they go. That is, if you move and attack, your next turn will be later than if you simply Defended. In Fire Emblem, it has the "Your entire party moves during your turn. Then the entire enemy party moves during their turn." structure, which I find really stupid in a SRPG. I find that it actually diminishes strategy, because it makes it that much easier to flank and concentrate-fire on an opponent. And it makes it that much easier for them to do the same.

I feel like when I die in FE, it's not really my fault. Here's a good example: I was in a situation where I was within range of a fastly-approaching enemy. I knew my healer would be a sitting duck, so I formed a wall in front of my healer with my buffest units. A wall should be the best line of defense because it only allows a single point of entry for the opponent (vs an open unit, where it can be surrounded by four enemy units). It should have been the best possible strategy. After I positioned all my units carefully, it was "the enemy turn". The first enemy calvary unit attacked my hero. Did a small amount of damage, and then my hero counterattacked. The counterattack was so strong that the enemy died. Then the 2nd calvary unit attacked the same hero. Counterattack, died. By the time the fourth calvary unit got to that same unit, my hero was at 5hp. So of course, I died. Because my unit was TOO GOOD of a counterattacker. This is precisely what I meant by feeling that when I die it's not even my fault. Most would agree that my choice of a wall was the best defense possible. But because FE has this "your entire group goes, then entire enemy group goes" structure, my unit was better off MISSING the counterattack. I don't know what Intelligent Systems was thinking when they designed FE like that. It's ok when you have disposable units like in Advance Wars. Sacrifice is part of the strategy. But when you have characters that are sometimes important to the plot that can be killed off by such a system, then it ceases to be amusing. I'm not complaining about the difficulty at all. TO:LUCT is arguably more difficult, but I love it. I'm complaining about the inability to control your circumstances, and that's the problem with FE.

Another problem with FE DS in particular is that you're able to acquire too many characters. It's an issue for me personally because if I have a cast of characters to choose a party from, I will try to balance their levels out. Since you have like 30 characters in the game, I try to use my weakest members in the fights, and sometimes that's not feasible. The level difference between my units and the opponent's is too large. And because I divide the possible experience points between all 30 of my units, it means my units are not scaling up to the additional difficulty added by later levels. You can argue that I shouldn't balance my characters, but I've been burned by games in the past that forced you to use specific characters in your party as part of the plot OR make you create several teams at the very end. I could not finish Shining Force III because I -didn't- balance out my exp among all members. Finally, another stupid design decision is to have stats go up at random. That means, when you level up with a character, you could end up upgrading 6 of the 8 available stats. Or if you're unlucky, zero. Yes. Zero. You can level up and not have any changes to your character at all. It is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in an RPG.

Ultimately, Fire Emblem represents a game that I can appreciate only for historical significance. I can see how it introduced a form of exploration to SRPGs and a cool way of adding party members to your roster. I also enjoy some of the modern improvements, especially to user-interface, that came with this Nintendo DS remake. But I have major misgivings about the core combat engine. From what I've been told, modern FE isn't all that much different. Shadow Dragon is my first, and last, Fire Emblem.

Retro Game Challenge

Retro Game Challenge
Pile of Awesome - Nintendo DS
Battery Backup - 1 Save
1 player

I lucked out with Retro Game Challenge. I just happened to be around when a couple of people mentioned it in passing. I had never even heard of it before, but knew then that I had to have it. Basically, it's a collection of 80s-style parody games. Being raised as a NES-gamer, I couldn't help but be interested. RGC was originally released in late 2007 as Game Center CX Arino no Chousenjou. Thankfully, XSeed Games decided to bring it over, and they made quite the effort to preserve this labor of love.

The setup is a little odd. Some strange fellow is lousy at playing modern games, but absolutely loves the games he played growing up. So he ends up trapping you and forcing you to undergo his retro gaming challenges. Although not the most epic storyline, it does provide the backdrop for this quirky collection. The great thing is that these games play homage to many of the old classics from the 80s. Cosmic Gate is almost identical to Galaga. Robot Ninja Haggleman closely resembles Ninja Jajamarukun and Ninja Gaiden (NES). Guadia Quest is clearly modeled after the early Dragon Quests. But although these games are very retro in their look and feel, they also incorporate some modern twists. For example, Star Prince is a generic vertical shooter, with the ability to collect power-ups to change your weapon. But Star Prince adds the ability to absorb bullets through a shield mechanic and launch a barrage of fire as a counterattack and collectathon elements by uncovering P-R-I-N-C-E tiles scattered throughout the stage. These games successfully blend the tight design of traditional gameplay with newer mechanics to produce familiarity, yet feels fresh at the same time.

The game is structured as a series of challenges. For the most part, these challenges are fairly easy. They are presented to help you learn the basics of each game, rather than mastery of them. When a challenge is met, the game immediately stops and brings you back to the main story. This initially bugged me - you spend your time getting to a new part of the stage, and then the main game kicks you out. But as you complete the four challenges for a single game, you then earn the right to play that game in "Free Play" mode. So I guess the purpose of the main game is to fulfill challenges, and not necessarily to play each individual game to your own liking. In addition to unlocking "Free Play", you also unlock the next game in the compilation by completing a game's four challenges. The final challenge of RGC requires completion of all the games.

It was the little things that stood out most. The first game you play, Cosmic Gate, is very barebones. Being that the game was "released" in 1984, you get a basic title screen, blocky visuals, basic mechanics, poor grammar, and tinny music. But as you unlock additional games spanning "release dates" from 1986 to 1989, you see a progression of all those things. Haggleman 2 has noticeably better visuals and higher quality music than Haggleman 1. Cinematic cut scenes were introduced. Gameplay concepts are evolved. Ending credits became far more elaborate. Retro Game Challenge accurately portrays the 80s era of gaming. In addition to the 80s-esque games themselves, RGC includes a library of magazines with news, tips & tricks. As a kid growing up with an EGM subscription, it's a really nice touch. What's also interesting is the English localization by XSeed games. The RGC magazine is called "Game Fan" and has editors named "Dave H." and "Dan Sock", which are obvious American game culture references. It's details like these which show that both the Japanese developers and the American localization team delivered the game out of a passion for video games.

As far as the games themselves, there are 8 titles included, although perhaps only 6 unique titles.

- Cosmic Gate is the Galaga clone, with the addition of a power-up that can destroy multiple enemies with a single shot and warp zones.
- Robot Ninja Haggleman 1 & 2 are almost identical games. I guess the best way to describe them are 2d action platformers in a confined space. When you destroy all the enemies in the stage (usually by jumping on them), the boss reveals itself. The twist is that the game has a bunch of doors scattered throughout the stage and if you enter one door, all doors of the same color will open, revealing power-ups, damaging enemies, and possibly revealing the stage boss early. Haggleman 2 has larger stages, harder enemies and upgraded visuals.
-Rally King and Rally King SP are overhead perspective racing games. Being a rally game, drifting is of the essence. If you can drift for 1 full second, you'll trigger a "drift boost" which propels your car in the direction of your drift for a few seconds. It's similar to Mario Kart DS snaking, except you simply drift, not drift from side to side. Unlike Mario Kart, you take damage every time you hit a wall or another car, so if you're wreckless with your driving, it's game over. This causes you to be strategic about your drift boosts, because you're penalized for bumping into objects. Rally King SP is really a remix of Rally King, and not a sequel.
- Star Prince is a vertical scrolling shooter. It's a very solid game, with lots of things to shoot and dodge. Interestingly enough, the waves of enemies change randomly, so replaying the same stage will result in a slightly different experience.
- Guadia Quest is very much a take on Dragon Quest. You have a party of 3 characters with similar spells to those offered in DQ. The "Guadias" are special enemies that you can make a pact with. If you defeat one, they will help assist you in future battles. Unlike a party member, Guadias cannot be directly controlled, and they do not help out every turn. Still, their presence is appreciated because Guadia Quest is a surprisingly thorough adventure. Even though the overworld is limited with only a few dungeons, the game makes the most of it. The dungeons themselves are huge, with many branching paths to explore. There are puzzles, a variety of enemy types, difficult bosses, rare equipment, etc. - basically what you'd come to expect of any standalone J-RPG. It may be old-school, but it's old-school well done. My only gripes with it are that it mirrors retro-RPGing too well. You need to go to a submenu to talk to someone or to look at an object. I'm not entirely sure why that couldn't be done with a single button. And although most items and spells are explained in the manual, some are not, which can be frustrating because modern games have descriptions built into the interface. Another pet peeve of mine is how older RPGs had terrible shop interfaces, where you were basically purchasing items blindly, not knowing if the weapon you're buying is better than the one you're wielding. Almost all modern RPGs show you stats increases/decreases so you can easily make informed buying decisions. Guadia, like most early generation RPGs, does not. Still, despite my quips, I enjoyed Guadia Quest more than most RPGs today.
- Finally Robot Ninja Haggleman 3 marks the end of the collection. It is completely different than Haggleman 1 & 2, resembling Ninja Gaiden (NES) more than anything else. In HM 1 & 2, your main weapon was jumping on enemies to defeat them. Here, it's all about slashing them with a sword. Haggleman 3 also resembles Metroid in the way that certain sections of a stage are inaccessible until you acquire specific items.

All in all, it's a good mix of games and genres. Only the latter two have a save feature that allows you resume right where you left off. The first six games are pick-up-and-play so they don't really need it.

My curiosity was piqued when I first heard about this title. Now that I've got it in my hands, I love Retro Game Challenge even more. As a gamer defined by the 1980s myself, RGC hits all the right notes. It is undeniably a product made by gamers, for gamers. Coincidentally, Game Center CX 2 was released in Japan this past week. Here's hoping that RGC sells well enough to pave the way for RGC2. We need more games like these.

Half Life 2

Half Life 2
First Person Shooter - PC
HD Backup
1 player

Let's not beat around the bush. Half Life 2 is one of the few games that I hated playing from start to end. I didn't really like Half Life either, but I could respect it for what it did. I cannot say the same thing for Half Life 2. It is so completely artificial, that I honestly can not see why it was as well-received as it was.

Following the events of Half Life, Half Life 2 dumps you in its world as a fugitive right off the bat. Consequently, the bulk of the game is simply you running away. It plays out mostly like your average FPS, with the one exception of the gravity gun. With it, you can point at certain objects and attract them towards you. Once you've got a lock on the object and it's floating in front of you, you can then launch it out. So everyday objects like boxes and metal debris can be used as weapons.

Let's start with the good. When the game started, I was thrust in an entirely unfamiliar environment. The surroundings were drab. The regular folk were nervous. The people in power were bullies. It was one of the rare times in a game where I felt really tense due to the immersion. I didn't entirely know what was going on, but that was the beauty of it. You're not supposed to. You only have that nagging feeling that something is wrong. It's a feeling I would experience again later on. What's not so great is that the other time is at the very last stage of the game.

I'm not entirely sure what kind of game Half Life 2 is. Is it a FPS? I suppose. But the shooting action is probably the worst I've experienced in the genre. You face more or less the same carbon copy enemies throughout the entire game. Moreover, they're generally stupid and weak, which makes me wonder why they exist at all. I was thoroughly bored with pretty much every single shootout in the game. Is it a puzzle game? The first Half Life had some puzzle elements to it. HL2 does as well, however it seems de-emphasized. There were probably a couple of instances where you had to do something more than hitting a switch. Then is it a dialog FPS? Not really. Like the first Half Life, dialog happens in first person view with no cut-scenes, so you're always a part of the game. I'm not entirely sure this is a good way to present dialog, because it's boring to simply stand there waiting for people to finish talking. But what's worse is that Half Life 2's story isn't even worth listening to. It's cookie-cutter generic and could be elaborated in a single paragraph. Half Life 2 doesn't really succeed at anything.

Another major problem is the filler. HL2 has a definite beginning and end. But everything in between is woefully inadequate. The stages themselves seem like a string of half developed ideas with no real direction. Nothing demonstrates this better than the awful vehicle stages included. For most of the first half of the game, you'll be piloting a boat or a buggy. Both of them handle like molasses, and neither of them contribute to the game in any meaningful way. When you get these vehicles, most of the time you only need them to cover the incredibly long stretches of the map that would be way too cumbersome on foot. The other times, you're simply running away. The stage that takes the cake is "We Don't Go To Ravenholm". The entire stage revolves around fighting creepy, crawly things and zombies. It feels way more at home as a B-horror movie than as an integral part of Half Life 2. It just further cements my feelings that HL2 is nothing more than a bunch of bad concepts thrown together. Even the gravity gun seems like an add-on as opposed to an integral part of the game. Sure there are certain segments where the gravity gun is required to progress, or can assist in a given situation. But for 95% of the game, it's completely irrelevant. The bulk of Half Life 2 is hollow.

Rarely have I felt such disdain towards a game. Usually I can see some value in what a game is trying to accomplish, or I could see an audience it might be catered towards. But I simply cannot make sense out of Half Life 2. There are no redeeming qualities. What a complete waste of time.

Portal

Portal
First Person Puzzle? - PC
HD Backup
1 player

Portal was well-received when it appeared on Valve's Orange Box in 2007. Assuming it was just your average FPS, I didn't pay much attention to it. Recently, for whatever reason, I decided to watch the official trailer for the game... and turns out I was dead wrong. Portal wasn't an average FPS. In fact, it didn't resemble a FPS at all. So piqued was my curiosity, that I upgraded my archaic PC components and bought the Orange Box just to play it. I expected Portal to be good. What I didn't expect is that it would completely blow me away.

Portal is a puzzle game. It looks like a first person shooter. It controls like a first person shooter. But instead of bullets, rockets and lasers, the only gun you get creates portals. Left click for a blue portal, right click for an orange portal. Enter one, and you'll exit from the other. It sounds very simple, but it's completely brilliant. You can open a portal underneath an object to transport it. You can use a long fall into a portal to propel yourself out of the opposite portal. Your tools are simple, but the applications are numerous.

The game is generally set up in a series of stages, with one puzzle after another after another. The complexity of the solutions ramps up as the game goes along. In the later levels, the game includes laser-guided bots that are out to kill you. Since Portal is not an action-game in the normal sense, your only methods of taking out the machines come down to tipping them over from behind or knocking them down with objects, courtesy of an overhead portal. In these sections, it reminds me of stealth games in how you think of ways to get to the enemy undetected. The fact that the game is done in a FPS-style enhances the experience. Portal placement requires precise angles and locations, so the first person perspective is much appreciated. For instance, many of the puzzles require you to simply observe your surroundings to see what you need to do, and what you're capable of doing at any given situation. First-person perspective works best here, because you can quickly and easily get a full view of your environments.

Ingenuous. Surprising. Innovative. Breathtaking. Atmospheric. Captivating. Meticulously designed and beautifully executed. Portal just does everything right. Maybe for the first time in my life, I have nothing to complain about. Portal is perfect.

Tomb Raider The Last Revelation

Tomb Raider The Last Revelation
Puzzle Platform - Dreamcast
Battery Backup - 10 saves
1 player

The Last Revelation is the fourth game of the series. Tomb Raider II sort of took the title in a different direction, by having more human enemies to shoot and more ordinary settings to interact with. I didn't play much of II, but I distinctly recall a stage set in Venice, where you jumped on balconies and rooftops. The Last Revelation mostly goes back to its roots, with the bulk of the time spent in exotic locales. It feels very ambitious, with interconnecting stages that offer a long adventure for explorers. It's just too bad that when I think of this game, I can't help but utter obscenities. The Last Revelation is the only game reviewed here I have not completed.

Let's get this out of the way. The Last Revelation has some programming glitches that completely ruin the game. I know I said this with my last review of Bionic Commando Elite Forces, but this is much worse. Once you trigger the bug, your game is stuck forever. Worse yet, they are situated towards the end of the game, so if you trigger one of the bugs, and are left without a fresh save, you have only two options: 1) Quit the game, and start over from the beginning. 2) Quit the game, curse its existence, and expose its shoddy quality to any would-be player. Guess which category I'm in? After clocking in about 20 hours, I encountered a puzzle which requires pushing three stone blocks in specific sequences to open up several gates. But if you push the blocks in the wrong order, you almost always trigger a bug that prevents you from resetting the blocks, so you're unable to ever push them again. In fact, even if you push the blocks in the correct sequence, the bug could still occur, thus locking you out of some passageways that are required to finish the stage. I've read that it's been patched for the PC versions, but Playstation and Dreamcast owners are completely out of luck. The only workaround is having multiple save files, and hope that at least one of them doesn't have the bug triggered. Even then, you won't always know immediately that you've triggered the bug. Since I didn't have any uncorrupted saves, I was completely screwed and consequently, gave up playing it.

I did, however, go through most of the game, so I can discuss those items. A friend of mine mentioned that Tomb Raider is best in tombs. Given that developer CORE went further and further away from tomb exploration with TRII and TRIII, it's not as obvious as you might think. The Last Revelation thrusts you into an ancient tomb right from the get-go, and it's better for it. The sense of discovery and wonder from the first game is very much intact. The added bonus is that The Last Revelation ends up being a lot more creepy. Whereas the first TR had booby traps to guard treasures, The Last Revelation adds ancient curses to the mix. The atmosphere is much darker as a result. But, as a nod to the previous games, The Last Revelation still tries its hand at being an action game. There ends up being a fair amount of shooting. In addition to the animals, there are enemy ninjas, soldiers, and automated gun turrets to keep Lara busy.

At its center, The Last Revelation offers much of what the series has always offered. It's focused primarily on discovery and puzzle-solving. The puzzles in this outing generally require more logic than the original. That's one aspect I enjoyed. Many times, your next step may not be obvious, but if you took a moment to observe your surroundings, the answer will become clear. Tomb Raider excels at building subtle clues to the solutions into the environment. For the most part, you just have to pay attention. Many of the stages are connected to one another. This gives the game a less linear feel, as sometimes you'll need to backtrack through a previous stage to access your next destination. The upside is that you can utilize the level boundaries to regain all your health - each time you enter a stage, you start with a full bar. But one thing that is lost from previous games, are the summaries of stage results, such as number of secrets found, how long it took you to complete the stage, etc. Instead, you only have a cumulative count of those statistics. So if you discovered only 40 of the 70 game's secrets, you have no indication of which stages you're missing secrets in.

Other than the horrible QA, there are plenty of other issues that make The Last Revelation a drag to play. The biggest problem of all is that the game is way too dark. Unlike the previous games which had a brightness adjustment in the options menu, it has been removed here. Sure I could adjust my TV brightness for one stupid game. Or maybe the game shouldn't have been designed this way in the first place. The game is so dark, that half of the time all you see is a Lara in pitch darkness. To compensate, Lara can light flares, which emit a small radius of light for 20 seconds. But since they're of such limited quantity, you can't really use them every 20 seconds. Another option is to fire your pistols. When you fire your pistols, it lights up the immediate area around Lara for half a second. Since you have unlimited ammo, it works as a cheap-man's light source. But the area of light is much smaller than the flares, so it's easy to miss item pick-ups and clues to your next location. So what's the other workaround? You have binoculars in your inventory. Luckily, the binoculars have an illuminated view when using them. This is probably the preferred method, because you can always reuse your binoculars. But what this means is that every time you enter an unfamiliar area, you will bring up the Options menu, select Inventory, select the binoculars, then wave the camera around while holding the light button to see what's around you. Then you unequip the binoculars, face a different direction, call up the options menu, select inventory, select binoculars and do it again so you can finally get a good look at what is around you. Remember, observation is -everything- in this game. Making everything ridiculously dark was obviously an intentional decision by the developers. But it's obviously also such a horrible decision, that it makes playing the game a chore. Some other sore spots include rope swinging and motorcycle levels. There are a few segments in the game where you need to swing on one rope, jump off it, and grab onto another rope during your descent. If you're misaligned even a little bit, you will plummet to your death. Turns out... at least one rope jump segment will kill you if you line your trajectory up correctly. You have to be off to the side by a centimeter in order to correctly grab the next rope. What on earth was Core thinking? Core also thought it'd be fun to include a motorcycle to ride. So there are a series of stages in the second half of the game where you are forced to ride a bike around. It's not enough that the motorcycle handles like a pig, and has the turning radius of a plane. No, sirree. The developers thought it would be fun to have Lara pilot a motorcycle IN PITCH DARKNESS. To be fair, the bike has a headlight, and that automatically makes it a little better than the pathetic options Lara has on foot. But it exemplifies exactly what's wrong with the game.

Tomb Raider The Last Revelation tries so hard to be the epic Tomb Raider. It features huge levels that interconnect, unique puzzles to solve, a creepy atmosphere and a dramatic story. The glitch that ultimately ruined the game for me is one thing. But the poor judgment in making the game as dark as possible was already grounds for dismissing this game entirely. I tried to like The Last Revelation. Occasional glimpses of the original Tomb Raider shown through. But ultimately, every positive attribute was obscured by darkness.

Bionic Commando Elite Forces

Bionic Commando Elite Forces
Action - Gameboy Color
Battery Backup - 3 saves
1 player

Not to be confused with the Gameboy Bionic Commando, the Gameboy Color Elite Forces is the third entry for this series. Capcom hasn't really utilized this property much over the years, until they suddenly revived it by announcing titles for the HD systems out now. So what's a better way to celebrate than to go through the older titles?

Despite being in the same series, Elite Forces has a very different feel than the NES and Gameboy Bionic Commando games. Sure it's still got the same basic elements. You still choose a weapon, accessory, communicator and armor prior to entering stages. You still use your grappling arm to swing across chasms and scale heights. And you still can run into enemy trucks on the map to collect extra lives. But the visuals have changed dramatically. The character designs and backgrounds have been totally transformed to have sort of a cartoon-ish look. To complement the cartoon visuals, the developers gave your character much more fluid animation that's almost as nice as Prince of Persia and Flashback. But the overall effect of the new look is a turnoff for me. The architecture of the buildings and things you can grapple onto aren't very recognizable. It's almost like as if everything is just blobs with different colors. That might seem harsh, but the objects in the game don't really resemble anything. Compared to the detailed visuals of its Gameboy predecessor, Elite Forces is a giant step backwards, animation excluded.

Capcom introduces a couple of new elements to spice things up, but they are of dubious value. Now you can actually choose between two characters. This might sound like a cool option, but the male and female heroes don't seem to differ at all, other than one having longer hair. They both have the same abilities, are the same height and everything. No. I don't get the point either. Another addition to the game is sniping. In a handful of stages, you can interact with specific buildings and initiate a sniper event. The screen will switch to a first-person zoomed view, and you just point the camera around and shoot when an enemy is within the crosshairs. The enemy never notices you even if you miss, so the sniper segments are more about finding enemies with the lousy camera rather than the sniping itself. These sniping sequences aren't particularly interesting, and they break up the flow of the rest of the game.

Luckily, Capcom left the grappling gameplay intact. The Gameboy BC had some really tough segments at the end of the game, but was too easy for the bulk of it. Elite Forces, on the other hand, has you swinging around, letting go, extending your grapple hook at the right time and grabbing another object for the bulk of the game. There are challenging segments from early on, and despite the fluid animation of your character, your grapple arm is plenty responsive and quick. Looking only at this component, Elite Forces might be my favorite of the three games.

But Elite Forces is also riddled with problems that make it my least favorite game overall. First of all, there is a game destroying bug. I've heard it happens whenever you play Elite Forces on GBA or the GB Player. I've heard that it even occurs sometimes when you play it on the GBC! Basically the game will freeze whenever you complete an enemy truck encounter, and start a mission afterwards (ie. all the time). It doesn't matter if you reset the game. The bug will continue to lock-up the game. Someone found an odd workaround that works: Basically, every time you turn on the game, start a New Game, kill yourself until you get Game Over, then you can Load your Saved game without encountering the bug. I'm glad that there is a fix at all - the game is virtually unplayable otherwise - but having to do this trick every time you want to play, gets old.

Some of the other poor design issues do little to alleviate my irritation. Your character sprite is rather huge, and it affects the game a lot. For instance, when you swing around with your grappling arm, it's very easy to crash into enemies because of the sheer size of your character. I've also noticed that when you pull yourself up to a ledge, one of the frames of animation forces you to stand up, even if you're holding down to duck immediately after climbing up. I've been hit by bullets on a few occasions just because the pull-up animation forces me to stand for a split second. And just like the Gameboy Bionic Commando, Elite Forces makes the power reactor segments more difficult by adding more bosses to fight and requiring more shots to destroy the core, compared to the original NES game. But the boss fights here are extremely annoying. It seems as if you are forced to take hits from them, because they move at such a faster speed that they wind up bumping into you and causing you damage. I like that bosses generally have a window of timing in order to damage them, but I really oppose games where I'm forced to take damage no matter what. Finally, the audio is just plain bad. From the horrible quality of the voice and music sampling to the limited tracklist of 3 songs that loop over and over, this is one game that is better with the volume turned all the way off.

For all its fluid animation and spot-on grappling, Bionic Commando Elite Forces manages to bungle some of the simpler aspects of making a video game. Couple that with the game crashing each time you turn on the system, and you've got an unpolished, underdeveloped product. It almost feels unfinished at times. The one saving grace is the core underlying game, using your grappling arm physics to navigate stages, is pretty solid. Still, it's hard to recommend Elite Forces when you could simply be playing the vastly superior Gameboy or NES versions.

Thief

Thief
First Person Stealth? - PC
Hard Drive
1 player

I've been itching to play a FPS for the longest time, and then I recalled a recommendation from years back. My favorite FPS is Goldeneye007 on the N64, and someone mentioned I might want to look into Thief since I liked the more stealthy aspects of GE007. I guess what I didn't realize was that Thief wasn't so much a shooter at all, with very limited bow & arrow use. Still, the thought of a first person game with stealth mechanics appealed to me so I decided to give it a go. Thief won several gaming awards when it was first released back in 1998, and it's not hard to see why.

As the title suggests, you play the role of a thief. The first stage acts as both a tutorial and the setup for the game's premise. You begin by being trained by a Master of a Thief Society. With that kind of training, you acquire a bit of self-awareness about how adept you are at being hidden. The two primary elements are sight and sound. When you move into the shadows, you will be completely undetected unless an enemy bumps into you. Stepping out into the light will give you various gradients of visibility. In addition to using the dark to cloak you, you have to be careful about sound. As you interact with objects laid around, you may end up dropping an item, which will alert guards to a presence. Your footsteps also play a huge role, with the type of ground you walk on having a huge effect on the loudness. Luckily you can simply walk slower to deafen a lot of the footsteps, but some floor surfaces require more care than others. Since your thief character is pretty mindful of sight and sound, the game gives the player an indicator of how visible and audible you are to the people around you.

The game is structured as a series of missions with particular objectives. An example might be: 1) Find a way to get into the building. 2) Steal the master gem. 3) Loot as much as you can (Min. 500 gold). 4) Get back to the city streets. Occasionally objectives may change or be added as you go through a mission, but it doesn't really alter the game all that much. You still pretty much will pursue whatever the mission objectives say at the time.

What works:

The stealth action is done pretty well. Using the shadows to hide your presence and moving slowly on tiled floors is very intuitive and realistic. Your character cannot take a whole lot of physical damage, so although you could go the brute strength method and fight everyone you meet, chances are that you won't get very far. But there is an option. Similar to MGS, if you manage to sneak up behind enemies undetected, you can take them out with little fuss. In Thief, you can use your sword and hit them from behind and it counts as a backstab. Unfortunately, using your sword leaves blood stains and that alerts guards to a problem. You also have a mace that will knock enemies completely unconscious, so that's a great alternative. In both cases, you have to be mindful to carry the fallen bodies to areas where an enemy won't discover. But sight and sound don't only apply to yourself. You can detect nearby enemies by listening for their footsteps approaching (or departing). So it's neat how your senses are critical to your in-game success.

In addition to being mindful of lighting and the sounds your character makes, you possess some useful tools. My favorite tool is the rope arrow. If you aim and shoot a rope arrow at a wooden or clay surface, a rope will dangle down from it, allowing you to scale heights that were previously inaccessible. This causes you to be observant to your surroundings, and often times you'll be rewarded with the next step of your path, or some optional loot. There are also other tools like water arrows that you can use to douse torches, and thus create more darkness or lockpicks that help you unlock doors. There's a little bit of creativity in using these tools to suit your needs, and that's one of the strongest aspects.

Thief also excels in its exploration aspects. In each stage, you are thrust into a completely unfamiliar environment. It can be tense when you are sneaking around, not knowing where you're headed. There will be times when you are seemingly stuck, and some deliberate observation of your surroundings is necessary. In these aspects, Thief reminds me a lot of Tomb Raider. You really do feel as if you are this character, trying to make it through your unknown surroundings. Thief even has you exploring tombs for loot, so the comparison isn't that far off. Both games have you forming a mental map of your area, that gets more elaborate and focused as you explore and discover. Thief offers that kind of immersive experience.

What doesn't:

This might be a personal complaint, but I often felt as if the level layouts were at times too overwhelming to figure out. The exploration is a positive attribute overall, but sometimes you'll hit a crossroads with several branching pathways, and if you take any of those, it'll lead to more branching pathways. It can be confusing, and with little aid in the form of a map, the game occasionally feels bigger than it should be.

A bigger annoyance comes from the setting. I think Thief would have worked better if it were more focused on thieving from people. Instead, the developers have incorporated tombs, zombies, poison-breathing dinosaurs, demons, balls of fire and lobster men into the mix. It clashes with the realism presented elsewhere in the game, and frankly, it's just plain silly. Tomb Raider works on the mystical level, simply because we think of ancient tombs having booby traps. Plus most of the enemies in Tomb Raider are actually natural (bats, wolves, and male stalkers). Thief has LOBSTER MEN. I can't tell whether Thief wants to present an immersive experience or shove a hokey game in your face. It ends up straddling both sides, and this is probably my biggest problem with the game.

Some other problems occur due to some design decisions. One thing I didn't like is that there's no quicksave or quickload. You have to go to the option screen, select a file, then select save/load. It's a three step process, which is kind of annoying. But more importantly, I think some of the stealth parts are a bit wonky. You are free to play Thief in super stealth mode, trying to be unnoticed by anyone. Or you can try to take people out from the back, still in stealth mode, but you eliminate the opposition. Or you can simply fight people head-to-head. The problem is, if you are detected, the game often treats it as an all-or-nothing situation. An enemy might spot you, raise an alarm, and then the rest of the 50 guards in the stage will be on the lookout for you. In that heightened state of awareness, many of your stealth tricks no longer work. You can't do one-hit knockouts from behind, and even moving quietly seems to provoke them. In MGS, the enemies cool off after maybe two minutes of not detecting you. Here in Thief, once you piss them off, they're pissed off forever, and they tell their buddies to be pissed off too. You could always restart the mission, but it's not always fun when this happens 45 minutes in.

I do think Thief is a clever game for the most part. The stealth aspects are pretty sophisticated, making you aware of your movements and those around you. But its problems are too significant for me to simply ignore. I feel as if the stupid zombie and demonic crap ruins what would otherwise be a solid, focused game. I also enjoyed the actual stage layouts more when it was a mansion to explore, rather than cursed ruins. Perhaps what Thief is, is inconsistent. It has all the right elements to be good. But as an entire package, it falls short of the mark.

Advance Wars

Advance Wars
Strategy - Gameboy Advance
Battery Backup - 1 Saves
1 player / 2-4 player versus

The world of handhelds is an interesting one. There are some who love portable gaming, and others who absolutely loathe it. I confess to sympathizing with both sides of the spectrum. I enjoy what portable gaming has to offer (2d visuals, ability to play in bed, and usually a quicksave feature), but acknowledge that often times, developers take shortcuts and don't aim to make the best possible product like they do with console games. Developer Intelligent Systems refused to go that route and in 2001, released Advance Wars to the GBA. Although this is a long running series, Advance Wars is the first one to come out in English. Luckily, it was worth the wait.

Advance Wars is a tactical grid-based war game. During your turn, you move individual units around a rectangular map, and attack an enemy if possible. Each unit has ten health, and when reduced to zero, the unit is destroyed. Although the fundamentals are very simple, there's quite a bit of depth to it. First of all, there are a bunch of different units. There are troops, tanks, long distance artillery, ships, planes, and different types of models within those categories. Each unit type has its own strengths, weaknesses, movement and weapon range. For instance, the helicopter can fly a great distance, drop missiles on ground forces, and has moderate success gunning down other helicopters. But they're completely useless against fighter planes and bombers. It's mostly set up like rock-paper-scissors, where units have specific strengths against a particular unit, but may have a severe weakness versus another. In general, the goal of each map is to either defeat all of the opponent's units or to capture their base.

The combat itself is pretty standard for the genre. The most important factors to consider are unit types and health. Because of the rock-paper-scissors hierarchy, it's best to only attack with units that are strong against the enemy's units. Enemies will counterattack after you've dealt damage, so it's usually not beneficial to attack with weaker units. But health is also very important. You inflict twice as much damage at 10 health, than you do at 5 health. One other thing that influences combat is terrain. Depending on where your unit is located, you may get defensive bonuses to offset damage taken. It may seem like there's a lot of variables to keep track of, but the game is very helpful about that. Whenever you initiate an attack, it shows you exactly how much damage you will inflict, so you can plan your moves accordingly. One final item that can turn the tide of battle are the COs (commanding officers). In this game, you select a CO before entering a map, and each CO has a special power in addition to some inherent unit bonuses. Once their special meter is charged up through dealing and receiving damage, you can utilize their special ability. One example of a CO power is Grit's ability to increase all the long-distance units' range for that turn. It can be a game-changer if the enemy isn't prepared for it.

One of the more interesting components of the game is that infantry troops can capture buildings. They'll need at least two turns to capture a neutral or an enemy building, but once they do, the benefits are plentiful. A normal building that you own will heal any units sitting there 2 health per turn. Buildings will boost your defense because of the terrain bonus, so they act as safe havens to retreat to. You can also capture production buildings such as shipdocks, which will allow you to build submarines and ships. You accrue money every turn proportional to the number of buildings under your control, so there's plenty of incentive to capture buildings. Also recall that one possible victory condition is capturing your enemy's headquarters building. With this sort of system implemented, it ensures that you'll want to keep a mixed army of both vehicles and normal infantry.

What impresses most about Advance Wars is the wealth of resources. There are a lot of variables to consider in the game, such as what unit is good vs what, and how far an enemy is able to move. But the game documents all the information you need. Hit one button and you bring up information on a unit such as its weapons, its weaknesses, and its stats. Hit another button, and you'll have a grid representation of the unit's movement capability. The game is just so incredibly user-friendly, and manages to cram all the information in such a small space. But more than just the practical help menus, Advance Wars offers something even greater - a 14 stage tutorial. The game walks you through all of the units and game systems through the tutorial. Each tutorial stage is a real stage with objectives. The only difference is that the tutorial stages are designed so that you get familiar with certain aspects of the game with each new stage. If the entire game were just the Tutorial, Advance Wars would have been a great game. But it doesn't stop there. There's an entirely separate Campaign mode and a War Room of individual challenges for a total of over 50 stages! It's just amazing how much content it offers.

There are a few annoyances though. I can't say I care for the music. It's not bad, but when you have to hear the music loop for the length of a stage (sometimes an hour or more), the best thing I could say is that it's forgettable. Another thing I'm not particular fond of is Fog of War. Advance Wars employs this RTS pillar, yet I don't know if I really like the idea in a turn-based game where precision positioning is of the utmost importance. I suppose in some ways, it makes the battleground more realistic. Luckily, Fog of War is only utilized in a small fraction of the stages. Most of the stages are laid out like a typical wargame, where you'd be able to see all the pieces and possible locations on the map. One other annoyance is the last mission. It's quite a nightmare. The layout of the stage is such that even if you dominate the map, you'll can only make incremental progress towards winning the actual stage. I think it took me roughly 3 hours. Thank goodness for quicksave.

Irritations aside, if strategy games are your cup of tea, Advance Wars is one of the finest examples out there. In many ways, I much prefer this style of tactical play over SRPGs. In a game like this, it may not be optimal to put an infantry unit in front of an enemy tank. Due to the rock-paper-scissors hierarchy, it's just plain suicide. But that's also the beauty of it. It can be a completely valid strategy to sacrifice a unit either as bait, or to prevent enemy movement. In SRPGs, some games implement permanent death so you'd want to keep all your characters alive as long as possible. It's a bit tricky to say which style is more challenging, since SRPGs also have characters that level and improve over time. But I would say that Advance Wars does have more strategic depth simply because sacrifice is integral to tactical planning. The fact that Advance Wars comes full of strategic options and longevity in the stages is quite an achievement. I would have respected it regardless of whether it was on a portable or a console. Nevertheless, despite my glowing compliments, there was a slight disconnect with my actual feelings. I think it's an incredible game, but I don't love it. I finally figured it out. Advance Wars is merely a great take on the strategy war game. No more, no less. It doesn't push the envelope in any way, and that sort of dulls my emotions for it. While that might not matter as much to other people, for me, it's what keeps Advance Wars from reaching excellence.

Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen

Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen
RPG - Nintendo DS
Battery Backup - 3 Saves
1 player / WLAN Town Building

While not the first, Dragon Quest is the influence of what we now recognize as the traditional Japanese RPG. I played the first back in the 80s when it was released. And I hated it. It was completely tedious and dull, so much in fact, that I hadn't played another DQ title since. But because of the cult following, I felt like I should give the series another shot. Enter DQIV. I wasn't really sure what I was expecting going into this DS remake of a NES game, but I definitely developed an appreciation for what the series has to offer.

Dragon Quest IV is actually quite an interesting case study for me. It answers the question: "How would I feel about an RPG that does EVERYTHING right, except for one thing I care about most?" I adore the visual style, with traditional sprites over 3D polygonal rotatable buildings and backgrounds. It reminds me a lot of Grandia's style, and I am completely in love with it. Just like Grandia, the rotating backgrounds makes exploration really fun. In addition to treasure chests, there are plenty of medals to collect, in exchange for rare items. The added bonus of dual screens is very convenient in helping you see what is ahead too. In traditional Enix fashion, the orchestral soundtrack is also very nicely done. And the story? Ok... well... it's as generic cookie cutter fodder as they come (and what RPG isn't?), but I definitely enjoyed the story structure. The game is broken into chapters, hence the title, and makes the plot unfold more like a book, which is neat. One of the series' charms is actually specific to the English localization. Each kingdom has its own style of speech, which adds a lot of personality. One kingdom speaks with a heavy Russian accented English. Another parades its French influences. All of it just adds up to a world brimming with life.

Unfortunately, the best thing I can say about the combat engine is that it's tolerable. It all comes down to this - DQIV's battle mechanics are too simplistic for my tastes. The menu options are tried and true: Fight, Magic, Item, Flee - nothing more, nothing less. It's hard for me to be excited by the limited options, because I really enjoy tactical planning. With DQ, there's little to go on. To its credit, DQIV is the best implementation of this style of gameplay. This is a game in which party buffs and enemy debuffs, in addition to the usual arsenal of attacks and offensive spells, are essential against bosses and even some of the normal enemies. I like that each spell in the game is an integral part of the experience. I also like that DQIV implements enemy groupings so that there is effectively a difference between single-target spells and ones with an area-of-effect. Finally, I'm glad to report that DQIV allows your non-party members to share in experience, circumventing the tedium of rotating members in and out like a lot of other games. DQ may be simple, but at least it offers a focused battle experience. So while other games with similar mechanics drive me mad, Dragon Quest IV manages to be unoffensive.

Maybe that's the key to my overall opinion. DQIV hit all the right notes on everything, except combat. I place such a high value on combat because it is the only aspect of Japanese RPGs that differentiate it from adventure games. It comprises most of the playtime. Hence combat makes or breaks RPGs for me. I couldn't ever say I liked DQIV's combat. Nor could I say I hated it. Dragon Quest IV somehow manages to not offend. In the end, I rather enjoyed the adventure. There's just so much to love. I ultimately wish the fights had more depth to them, but when it comes down to it, I'm eagerly anticipating DQV. Maybe that's all that matters.

Sonic Chronicles

Sonic Chronicles The Dark Brotherhood
RPG - Nintendo DS
Battery Backup - 3 Saves
1 player / WLAN Chao Trading

Any mention of Sonic these days, and you'll be met with sighs and groans. Sega has done a wonderful job of degrading and stomping on this once respected franchise. With such atrocities as Shadow the Hedgehog and to a lesser extent the Sonic Adventure games, the announcement of a Sonic RPG was met with sharp criticism and skepticism. Then Bioware announced they were developing it. Mass confusion followed. Would this be a return to glory, or simply another swing at the equine's corpse? Well, it depends how you look at it.

Bioware has stated that one of their challenges was getting people excited for Sonic's friends again. On that, they're completely correct. Gamers have not really warmed towards Big the Cat, Cream, Rouge the Bat, etc. When interviewed, Bioware stated that they "think [Sonic Chronicles] is going to revitalize the love of Sonic's friends." Uh... not quite. Although they pulled most of the characters from the Sonic universe into this story, the dialog hardly goes beyond their one-dimensional personalities we've seen thus far. But because of the RPG structure, Bioware has successfully made Sonic's friends an integral part of the game. You need to include certain characters to utilize their strengths in party-based combat. You need to use certain characters to use their special abilities on the world map. You didn't expect to fly around with Knuckles looking for randomly generated gems to hiphop music in Sonic Adventure 2. But in Sonic Chronicles, you expect party travel. It fits and makes perfect sense.

Sonic Chronicles is pretty much what you would expect from a "Sonic RPG". It has a hokey story. It has action-y gameplay. It has its own style. And it's got bursts of speed (amidst a few lengthy fights). For a Bioware game, it is strange that the biggest weakness is the dialog. Perhaps they didn't have much freedom with the material, but the story comes off being simplistic and childish. I guess it's a Sonic game after all. Gems are stolen. Sonic and friends have to get them back. Blah blah blah. What was a little odd was how much sci-fi was thrown into the story. There are space ships and laser cannons and aliens - quite a departure from Sonic's early days of animal-controlled robots. Oh wait, I guess it was always a bit sci-fi. Known for their dialog trees, Bioware does little with conversation here. Instead of having multi-branching paths, most of response options are there to clarify and provide additional information rather than affect the story. The only thing I could see was that at one point, Amy Rose came up to me and thanked me for being so nice to her, which I presume she wouldn't do if I had chosen otherwise.

The game operates almost entirely off of stylus controls. Wandering around the overworld simply requires you directing your character with a stylus. Press down on the touchscreen and your character will start heading that same direction. Sometimes you'll encounter objects that you can interact with, such as talking with a NPC, opening a treasure box, or doing a spin-dash through a loop. In these situations, an icon will pop up and you can perform that action with L or R - the only buttons you can utilize in the game. You're holding onto the DS with your other hand anyway, so the L/R shoulders make the perfect action button. Although Sonic has never been stylus-controlled before, it actually manages to feel natural. Just like how most of 2D Sonic is moving in a direction and jumping at key times, Chronicles' movement mirrors that kind of flow. The game also offers quite a bit to explore. There are rings to find and chao to acquire in each world. There are also puzzles which require input from each of your characters to solve. And in true Bioware fashion, you'll be able to trigger quests, and a log is provided to keep track of them and your progress.

Combat, on the other hand, is as non-Sonic as you can get. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. For the most part, the visible encounters, menus and options resemble that of a Japanese RPG. You select commands for party members, and the turns will play out according to Agility/Speed attributes. Instead of magic spells, Sonic and friends have POW moves which require POW Points. When you execute a POW move, you have to do some work. The mechanics resemble Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents where circles will appear on-screen, and you'll have to tap them and follow their motions to a specific timing. On the flip side, your enemies will also perform POW moves that you can defend with the same types of motions. This type of system encourages more interaction in the battles, and I welcome it. True, having this system can slow the game down and force battles to be long. But as a player, I'm now a participant in what would otherwise be a monotonous endeavor. Another interesting aspect of battles are the escape sequences. If you flee from battle, or an enemy does, your party members will begin a side-scrolling running stage. Obstacles and speed-ups will be scattered along the ground to impede or aid your running. Your interact by tapping on characters to make them jump. The running is automatic. This resembles the forced-scrolling stages seen in the Sonic Advance games.

There are definitely some downsides though. Chronicles has the weakest music of any Sonic game. The original Sonic the Hedgehog had amazing tunes. And Naganuma re-imagined Sonic music with his take on Rush. I was not a fan of the Sonic Adventure soundtracks. But in Chronicles, it's so generic and forgettable that I don't even have an opinion. That's even worse, in my book. Also, for some reason, there is lag when pulling up the option menu. You'll face it whenever you want to use an item, equip a Chao for its special abilities, check you quest log or save your game. Another irritation is in the way the game is structured. Sometimes you'll accidentally trigger a story advance, with no way to go back, robbing you of exploration opportunities. Finally, the game manual and in-game help menus are inadequate. There's no documentation anywhere of what the status icons/effects do. Despite finishing the game, I still have no clue what some of the attacks are.

In the end, Sonic Chronicles feels very different from other RPGs I've played. I didn't really care that it wasn't the pinnacle of storytelling or user interface. I didn't care that some of the battles dragged on and on, as I alternated between using POW attacks which broke through enemy defenses, and defending to fill my POW Points back up. I didn't care that the ending was a complete tease. Flawed or not, Sonic Chronicles was completely entertaining to play. It's been a long time since anyone could say that about a Sonic game.