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The Ludophile's Repertoire

I have been playing video games since forever. (Well, for obvious physical reasons, since 198X, but you see my point). One of my personal silly life goals is to try every single game console. So here is, in the chronological order that I experienced them (not their release date), the consoles which I had a go at so far:

Starting October 1st, 2006, I will chronicle my gaming by putting up here every game that I try. Some of them will get reviewed if I find something intelligent or funny to say about them (the former being the better, of course), in perfect inequity length- and content-wise. Click on the hyperlinked one-line reviews to access the full text.
 
Each game gets a score measured by the number of ghosts (the more the merrier!). I also have in my inventory two special awards: a Pac-Man for an outstanding game, and a fleeing ghost for a really, really bad game. If you ever encounter a game to which I handed an award, you should definitely try it. Especially if the award is a fleeing ghost. There is much wisdom to be gained from playing outrageously bad games.
 
I also put up a "Knowledge" column so you can see whether I'm very familiar with this game or merely acquainted:
 
means I played for an evening at a friend's house, tried a few games, or saw someone else playing it a bit;
 
means I played it for many hours but not all the way through;
 
means I completed it or played long enough to have a very good understanding of the game.
 
Don't be afraid to to discuss any game you see in the list below. I particularly enjoy exchanging ideas with people around my main research interests.

Game System Knowledge Rating Review
Contra III: The Alien Wars SNES The action platform/shooting game par excellence. A timeless classic.
Metroid: Zero Mission GBA Short and sweet, excellent flow. There are better 2D Metroid games though.
Mean Streets PC Excellent! Tex Murphy's splash start has aged well (graphics aside).
Martian Memorandum PC Too many frustrating timed action parts, not funny enough, and the plot isn't too good either.
Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge Xbox As good as arcade-style flight simulators get. Smooth controls, good variety of planes and situations, and an okay story.
Urban Runner PC Full review
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night PS1 Full review
Captain Commando SNES A surprisingly enjoyable and well-done 20-minute beat-'em-up, with goofy characters as an added bonus.
Brandish SNES Doesn't look too bad, but I bet it felt outdated back in 1995. There's just no good reason to play this nowadays.
Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse NES Wow. Multilinear platformer with different characters, fair difficulty and password system, and excellent soundtrack.
The Untouchables SNES A good licensed game, which isn't saying much. Excellent graphics and interesting mix of genres, but the difficulty level is really prohibitive. A case of forced player-avatar identification: try to play with any alcohol whatsoever and you'll be sorry.
Top Gear SNES A fun and easy to play racing game with a very good soundtrack, though graphically and technically challenged.
Top Gear 2 SNES Looks good, but the difficulty's been raised like there's no tomorrow. Bumping other cars is unforgiving and unavoidable.
Final Fantasy 2 GBA/NES Powerful and deep game system for the time, but felt way too long for my tastes.
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings Vol. 1 SNES Difficult controls, way too hard enemies, and the game lacks clear directions. Be prepared to get lost and get killed. A lot.
Wii Sports Wii A good party game that is fun for a while, but ultimately shallow. Looks more like a tutorial for using the controller than a game on its own.
Enchanted Arms X360 In-depth review.
American Civil War: A Nation Divided X360 It kept crashing 7 minutes into the game when I wanted to play the North campaign...so much for history. This game does everything COD does, only slightly worse. Even the history-learning aspect is less developed than COD's mission briefings. The maps are confusing and the objectives are unclear. The only enjoyable and educative thing this game offers is insight on how long it actually took for a man to reload his gun at the time, which unfortunately occurs every 15 seconds or so.
Saint's Row (demo) X360 A mildly enjoyable GTA clone, though it offers nothing new (not even the setting). Cruder, dirtier, and more sexist and demeaning, if that's your thing.
Superman Returns (demo) X360 After the miserable, utter failure that was Superman 64, Superman Returns and almost makes it. My firm belief is that no matter how natural you try to make the controls, Superman is just too fast and has too many super-powers for a player to control it all. Let's hope third time is going to be the charm.
F.E.A.R. (demo) X360 From what I gather from the demo, there's a superbly done, truly horrific Shining-level 2-minute sequence buried in boring 30-minute straight shootouts. I hope the ratio shifts around in the whole game.
Just Cause X360 Full review
Test Drive Unlimited (demo) X360 Fun and pretty, but I'm not an Xbox Live subscriber and the online component seems to be the most interesting part. The demo makes it look promising though.
Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures SNES A sign of what was to come from EA. This game uses the engine from the Super Star Wars series, and compacts all three movies in a single cartridge. Overall, a clean and playable platformer that oozes cheapness with a glint of rush job.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade NES A multi-genre game that closely follows the movie and features a great soundtrack. Too bad its weird fighting mechanics and controls make it downright impossible to finish.
WWF Raw SNES It was an excellent wrestling game back in the day, with different attributes for each character and a good variety of events. Today it still works well for different reasons - Lex Luger, Razor Ramon and Bret Hart can live on!
Contra NES Excellent! But how HARD does it have to be? One of the early Shooting/Platformers and it still holds up very well by 2007 standards.
Blades of Steel NES A very decent hockey game sporting good music, great graphics, fun and easy controls and digitized speech - ugly, but still. The grunts which characters make when punched, complete with the sliding animation, are so ridiculous they enhance the experience. Too bad the game teaches kids wrong values - when you punch someone, they get put to rest and the loser has one player less! In short: punch their lights out, that's the sure way to victory! Dreadful.
Battle of Olympus NES Incredible! Granted, it's a carbon copy of Zelda 2/Castlevania 2, with an added anti-gravity move lifted straight from Metal Storm, but it totally rocks. It's at least as good as all these games. And the lesson it teaches us is that buying an engine and copying a formula can be both highly interesting and profitable, since it took only three people to make this game! Truly a diamond in the rough.
Ghostbusters 2 NES Move along, nothing to see here. After the Angry Video Game Nerd's aggressive review of Ghostbusters (1), I had to try this sequel. It's a lot better than the first, but still terrible. The difficulty level is high, and the two stages I've seen don't seem to offer anything I couldn't find elsewhere, only better. A rough platforming stage and a rough driving stage makes a rough game, no matter how many diamonds you sprinkle on top.
Shadowrun SNES Shadowrun is one of those classics you can easily overlook. This isometric real-time RPG features a deep storyline, nice character development mechanics, an interesting conversation and topics system (the first I've had the pleasure to experience back in 1994), and the cyberpunk setting we all love (or should anyway). It is worth every penny you will put on acquiring it, even if the interface takes some time getting accustomed to.
Batman Returns SNES Seems like a pretty decent beat-em'up, nice graphics, interesting use of Batman trademark gadgets, and the player even has some thinking to do. Plus, it was a long time since I've had a completely limp arm as a result from frantic shooting (in the driving stage).
Metroid II: Return of Samus GB A superb game that marks the transition between the archaic original Metroid and the timeless classic that is Super Metroid. Getting the Spider Ball early on creates a very unique sequence progression and puts as much emphasis on Morph Ball mode as the standard jumping and shooting parts.
Super Mario Bros. 3 NES Do I really need to explain?
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance Wii Characters gain powers without you noticing them, there is no change of strategy needed after a couple of hours, it is extremely repetitive, the environments are bland, uninteresting and all alike, the storyline is full of incoherences and barely excusable for holding things together, the missions are contrived and reek of the roadblock syndrome, the dialogues are useless, the game's mechanics are uninventive and imprecise, the "Simon Says" sequences during boss fights takes away any sense of urgency and breaks the gameplay rhythm, the game defeats its own mechanics by forcing you to stick with a team of 4 characters through the whole game because if you switch then you lose all the benefits of their experience and levels and cannot manage to defeat the enemies, and all these characters get locked in a single outfit since you're upgrading only these. Avoid this one like the plague.
Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers N64 I liked the original Shadowgate, but since owning the GBA remake I have noticed it barely held to today's standards. It was good for the NES days but wouldn't pass the 21st-century test. The new Nintendo 64 Shadowgate game grasped my attention and so I gave it a try. Turns out the absence of logical solutions to puzzles in the NES Shadowgate was not a technical limitation or simply a "they didn't know better" scenario, but was deeply ingrained in the essence of what Shadowgate is. This N64 sequel is as clumsy and dumb as the original. It is devoid of any interesting events, and the ending is laughable since the player has no clue what is going on and no explanation of anything happening is given. In short, Shadowgate 64, like Shadowgate, is a string of items to be picked up, carried, and used in places, without any common sense, logic, or purpose.
Hitman: Blood Money Xbox Full review
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin DS Is this the pinnacle of the "Metroidvania" sub-genre? How will anyone top this game off? Portrait of Ruin does away with the Street Fighter-type moves to cast spells that were introduced in Symphony of the Night, instead replacing it with a second controllable character that can cast a wide variety of magic spells. Using two characters really makes an interesting innovation. The challenge is tough but fair. The areas to explore are more varied than ever thanks to the portraits. The colorful cast of enemies is back, and completionists will find plenty to do with mastering weapons and finding all the rare drops. As usual, the music is awesome. Some features feel tacked-on and are becoming ridiculous (the shop in the castle, the guy who gives arbitrary quests...), and even if the game acknowledges that by making fun of these conventions itself, it has only limited success in so doing. But this does not prevent the game from being one of the best to come since a long time.
Final Fantasy IV (original Japanese) SNES This is a fan-translated ROM. The difference between the original game and the dumbed-down version we got in the Occident is basically of the kind that separates humans from cats. You've got some bones and organs in common, but not much else. Characters have extra commands in battle, there's a bunch of extra items allowing for more strategic fights (you can pick up items that cast Reflect on you for the fight against Bahamut, for instance), and there's a whole lot more narrative material provided. Things make sense, which is a huge improvement over my childhood memories. The duality of Cecil and Golbez and the theme of choosing one's path is explored a little more, and we learn that Kain and Cecil were orphans adopted by the King of Baron. Granted, all this does not change the game from the core, but it raises it a notch in my mind and puts it on even foot with Final Fantasy III US (6).
Nightshade NES Great jumping jellyfish! It's Lampshade! This is a gem in the forgotten NES library of games. A point-and-click adventure/action fighting hybrid game, Nightshade is one of the most unique offerings to have graced the NES. The writing is excellent, of Lucasarts-adventures caliber. I won't spoil any of the jokes so prospective players can enjoy the humor of this superhero satire set in the Noir Metro City. Let it be said, though, that this game HAS to be played on an emulator using the save-state function. This adventure game has no battery back-up or passwords system. If this seems idiotic, know that there are fight sequences which are really hard and fast-going. You can get stunlocked and die. (being stunlocked is a WoW term that can be applied to other games. In most games, when you get hit your character recoils for a second or so. This is the "stun". If you can chain hits fast enough, you can "lock" your opponent in a state of stunning and keep dishing out damage until he dies. In most games this is a serious flaw and developers usually take measures to avoid that, for example by making the stun duration shorter than the time it takes for the opponent to connect another hit.) The other thing of genius in Nightshade is that when you die, Sutekh places you in some sort of Batmanesque booby-trap which can be escaped in a way or another. Each time you die the trap becomes more serious and the last trap cannot be escaped. Essentially, they took the concept of "lives" and integrated it in the game's narrative. If it featured a password system, Nightshade would have scored a well-deserved Pac-Man award. Playing it on an emulator might give you this level of satisfaction.
New Super Mario Bros DS Full review
Brain Age DS The basic idea is intriguing and the game is genuinely fun for a few days. But ultimately, the limited number of exercises available and their lack of interesting variety makes this a limited-value purchase. The arbitrariness of difficulty caused by the randomized puzzles, and thus of your own performance as a player, is responsible for the rapid decline in interest you will probably experience. Finally, it takes too long to unlock the new exercises, and it doesn't help that the later ones are the most interesting. The Sudoku section is good, but you can get a Sudoku book with 100 exercises and a pen for around 7$, and it's a lot more practical. Brain Age is to be regarded as the first iteration of a novel idea, with its fair share of flaws.
Advance Wars: Dual Strike DS Intelligent Systems is a strange developer. I'm sure that their systems are very intelligent, but they should start acknowledging their players' intelligence too. This game, like Super Paper Mario and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, feels like a 12-hour tutorial. The game takes you by the hand and spoon-feeds new gameplay patterns to you. The result is that I lose interest at one point because usually, I want to be given a space of possibilities by a game engine, and not do everything an NPC tells me to. Especially in a strategy game. It is, however, well-built and balanced, and should therefore prove to be a safe investment for multiplayer usage.
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption Wii Samus returns and, as advertised on the back of the game, for the first time you actually become her! It isn't however so much because of the Wii's (I concede, very interesting) controls, but rather because of the game's extensive universe. For the first time Metroid fans can talk with people, visit a Galactic Federation frigate, command their ship to land in different spots, and visit multiple planets. With Corruption, Metroid just jumped from antique theater to modernity. Unity of time, space and action is broken, and the result is incredible. The characteristic Metroidesque sense of loneliness is all the more poignant when you have seen people beforehand. The game mechanics build on the best of the prior Prime titles and expand them with new functionalities that are very interesting. The environments are diverse and finally, we get a mapping for the various suit upgrades, which allows for anyone to get 100% completion. This is a revolutionary title that brings as much to the Metroid series as Prime 1 did.
Halo 3 X360 I read everywhere that the multiplayer was really good, and I can't comment on that since I'm not a paying Xbox Live subscriber. The single-player campaign isn't good at all though. You can't play on 4-player split-screen in coop, but you can in deathmatch? What's wrong? I would have liked to play with 3 friends. The gameplay is more of the same. I heard there were more weapons but I can't think of any that struck me. Master Chief is supposed to be getting horrific visions from time to time, but they consist of either Cortana or Gravemind (by the way, you need either really fresh memories of Halo 2 or to read a FAQ to know who that guy is, as he is not presented to the player at all)uttering nonsensical sentences that sound like they ate one too many fortune cookies. The game's a typical series of plains, rooms and corridors. There really isn't anything special to see. But at 7-8 hours to finsh the game on Normal difficulty you likely won't regret the investment too much.
Gears of War X360 Full review
Mass Effect X360 Full review


Urban Runner

I often thought for no particular reason that Sierra was a kind of Hit-or-Miss company. For instance, I felt they hit the nail right on the head with King's Quest VI, and completely missed it with VII, but then that might just have been me. Now thanks to Urban Runner I can back up this intuition with a concrete proof.
 
Urban Runner is a FMV game. While some FMV games are good, or even really good, this one isn't one of them. The filming itself isn't bad, and I can see the director had a good grasp of what an adventure game was. For instance, there is a maze-like series of rooms that can easily be distinguished by the player because each is cast in a certain lighting and color. This kind of detail is often overlooked in FMV games and leads to spatial confusion.
 
But that's about it for the good part. The game comes on four CDs and lasts for roughly five hours. You will die very often because most of the game is timed and you must execute in short time spans very precise actions with little margin for error. It wouldn't be so bad if the solutions were plausible, but as they are, it requires your imagination to be of rubber band-stretching caliber. (What do you do when there's a goon running after you and you end up in a dead end? Why, you turn off the power switch, lower the electrified cable, spray oil on the ground and turn the power back on so the goon will slide on the oil and instinctively grab the wire for balance, electrocuting himself, silly!)
 
Now most of these FMV games with questionable interactivity or puzzles at least sport a good storyline. This one story is nothing short of pathetic. It starts with your character trying to double-cross someone and finding him dead, then running away from his bodyguard for a fair amount of time. Incidentally the bodyguard, when he sees you have entered a dead end, locks the door and patiently waits outside instead of coming to gun down your sorry unarmed self, so you may set up a trap with a fishing hook. When the bodyguard is knocked over, you can pick up his nail file (nevermind the gun, or a quick blow to the head to render him unconscious). When our protagonist eventually gets home, a killer is waiting for him and he escapes to an hotel, following a trail of clues. He takes the time to score with a woman who turns out to be a sexy secret agent/spy/murderess avenging her father and brother's death, lawyers murdered for standing up to a secret society that attempts to use medical research to do something evil (by the time it was revealed, I was hardly paying any attention). The acting isn't too bad, but most of it takes place over things that aren't explained or make little to no sense. The game puts forward a sense of urgency and relentless pursuit when needed and then dissipates it completely as the protagonists take a quiet little evening together and "fall in love". The ending starts off bad, with the villain (introduced at about three-quarters of the game) giving corny, overacted speeches of the mad scientist variety. It keeps getting better thanks to a narrator popping up in the next-to-final sequence while the entirety of the game thus far had been narrated in first-person by the protagonist. All of this comes to its logical and unavoidable conclusion, that is, the hero's best friend that had been murdered magically comes back to life in the ending sequence, as it is revealed that "he was wearing a bulletproof vest". Of course, it doesn't help that the sole purpose of his comeback is so you can question him about the game's plot, which he patiently explains and recaps in detail. Seems like the developer was aware that the plot was badly explained and felt they could patch it up quick in the end.
 
No matter what angle you try to approach this game from, I guarantee you'll think it's bad. In fact, outside of study interests or pure curiosity, the best thing to do is to not approach it at all - let it rot away. I'm sure that's what Sierra would want. If you must, however, then I recommend you take it from behind, with a garbage bag ready up your sleeve. Stealth-kill it quickly!

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Few games can claim to have had as profound an impact on a game franchise as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. This title breathed a whole new life to the series, just as Ocarina of Time, Metroid Prime, Super Mario 64 and Megaman X did for Zelda, Metroid, Mario and Megaman.
 
When this game came out in 1997, Castlevanias were platform games comprising anywhere from 6 to 15 stages. The first game was a succession of levels, with the player having the possibility of picking different power-ups (weapons) along the way. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest was the oddball one, the Adventure of Link of the franchise. There were towns and people to be spoken to, items to be gathered in an inventory and used at the right time, and the world was a bit more open - the player could go left or right and come across ruins or mansions and enter them or not. In Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, players were treated to an action/platform game akin to the first with the added feature of having a partner among several possibilities and switching between characters in levels. There were also multiple paths to follow in order to reach Dracula. Super Castlevania IV had not really brought anything new.
 
Then came Symphony of the Night.
 
This game built upon the Metroidesque model by opening up the castle to the player, who is free to roam the place. He now has HP instead of a life bar, and can replenish them by saving his progress in save rooms. He gains experience and levels just like in RPGs by fighting monsters. This leads to improvements in total Max. HP, Max. Hearts, and in attributes such as Strength, Intelligence, or Luck. More importantly, the player can equip swords, rods, thrown weapons, shields, armor, accessories, and helmets, and collect relics granting him a variety of special powers. Movement is now extremely fluid thanks to relics allowing a double jump, or by turning into a wolf, a bat, or in mist form. Simply put, this game is a 90-degree curve, and definitely for the best. Today Castlevanias multiply - to a dangerous point even since Dracula's castle is supposed to materialize every 100 years (bar "special cases"), which would put games in 2000 pretty soon - and Konami rakes in the big bucks.
 
What's really surprising about this game to me is the depth and incredible variety and originality in the items department. SOTN has hundreds of weapons and most of them, even the most insignificant sword found in a secret wall somewhere, have unique special attacks. The Sword of Dawn can summon skeleton mages/soldiers/archers. The Moon Rod creates a flurry of projectiles, the Shield Rod casts a different spell when used in conjunction with the various shields of the game, the Sunstone increases the player's attributes after 6 hours of game time ("After sunrise"), the Walk Armor gains defense the more of the game's map you cover, the Spike Breaker armor breaks spikes, the Cat Circlet restores a lot of HP when you get hit by a cat (?!? there are two in the whole game...), the Twilight Cloak has a nifty visual flash, the Joseph's Cloak allows you to customize your cloak color, the three Alucart items (fakes!), when equipped together, give you the "alucart" status which boosts your luck, the Secret Boots increase your height a little (as if you went from 5'10'' to 6'2'')...a lot of these are useless but fun. Real fun. It makes collecting the items something you want to do because all the game's items are unique in some way, instead of being a boring +52 sword instead of a +45 one. This also gives the game a lot of replay value, since you can attempt another game using the sword that gets stronger the longer you play, or the cloak that converts damage to hearts so you can keep using your sub-weapons, or another of the five familiars. This game does everything right, and that's rare.

Just Cause

The demo made me say: "Really cool! It's GTA with more stunts, in South America, fighting a *fictional* evil dictator. Though I'm not too keen on playing a CIA savior tasked with "cleaning up" other countries, it has great controls and graphics, high-adrenaline action, and excellent music. A definite rental!"
 
Renting the full game for a week makes me say: "Even cooler!" The game is a more sandbox-oriented version of GTA. The islands are divided in a number of provinces which you can gain control of by liberating settlements. After liberation, you can do small side missions for the guerilla leader of that settlement. There's a lot of fun to be had just driving crazy, jumping out of the car and opening up your parachute, landing on top of another car and ejecting the driver to take his place. You can hijack helicopters and planes, drive them up over a few thousand feet in altitude and jump off for some sublime skydiving over the sunset, with some quiet angels singing in the background. This is definitely a unique experience in gaming that you have to see. The game has an okay storyline, with caricatural characters and humorous lines. The main quest is very short and straightforward, and the last mission is ridiculously too difficult. The side-quests are very repetitive - there are around 7 or 8 different quests, such as "go hijack vehicle X and bring it back" or "Go to point X, meet people and get item, then drive back". The speeches are canned and the mission descriptions are too, so you're really doing the same 7-8 missions over and over at different settlements and with different targets to accumulate points for your faction so you can get better weapons and vehicles.
All in all, a game that has some flaws, but stays strong in one department: fun. This is the type of game you can grab on for half-an-hour every day and enjoy for months to come if you like doing stunts and running from the police. I recommend a rental.

Hitman: Blood Money

This game deserves a perfect Pac-Man score, but only if you like the basics of it. It may not appeal to everyone. Think of an open-ended Splinter Cell with social interactions. You have to complete missions, which usually have a number of targets for you to eliminate, but you're free to walk around the place, dispose of civilians (preferably by knocking them unconscious rather than killing them, as casualties attract the police's attention and gains you notoriety between missions which must be avoided), disguise yourself with someone else's clothes, etc. This is a social stealth game more than a shadow stealth one: you're not chasing shadows and shooting/neckbreaking everything on which you can sneak up à la Metal Gear or Splinter Cell. You're undercover, and you have to keep your cover up. If you're dressed as a carpenter, you can carry a toolbox around and hide a gun in it, which you may retrieve once you pass the guard at the door. One could sum this type of gameplay thus: "Keep your act up, look at the situation, learn the guards' patrol paths, and be prepared to recognize opportunities and take advantage of them."
 
Killing the targets involves the highest savoir-faire: poisoning drinks, pushing people over railings, and rigging machines to explode or fall on people are but a few of the means you can employ. If all else fails, or if you can't figure out how to exploit the setting or people on the spot, you can always hide in shadows, watch the target's walking routine, find a dimly lit place - or shoot out the lights -, sneak up behind your victim and strangle them with your trusty fiber wire. Or a bullet using a silenced pistol. Or a lethal injection with a poisoned syringe. The possibilites are many, and the player is given a very wide dynamic range which allows him to feel like he's having a very personal experience. The storyline is interesting and unintrusive. But undoubtedly the best feature for me is the rich variety of locales. From the opera to a suburban home to a mental clinic, two missions are never the same. The said missions are of very sufficient number, and there is quite a bit of replayability thanks to the four difficulty settings - increased AI behavior, limited number of saves per mission, no "radar" function, and (I believe) additional mission objectives all create interestingly different takes for each level. Upgrades can be purchased for weapons, which allow for a few different playing styles. Sniper Rifle? Machine gun? Silenced pistols? Or the setup which became my "usual", no weapons. The only bad thing about the game, which someone told me, is that it's just an improved version of the two first games in the series. Which, if you've played none like me, is not a problem at all. I highly recommend trying it out, even for just a mission or two, since it's a unique gameplay experience, and everything in the game is polished and organic. Great job IO Software!

New Super Mario Bros.

I have been playing New Super Mario Bros for the DS for a healthy amount of time every day for a while now. So how good is it? It's Super Mario Bros. 3-good as regards design and fun factor. But mostly design. That is incredible. Granted, it's not too innovative - although the mini and mega mushrooms are a very organic addition and they do not feel out of place at all. Mostly, they fixed a lot of things that had been lying around in dormance since the early days of Mario. Sure, you could pick up coins in Mario 1 and get extra lives. They were mostly hidden in blocks or secret areas, the idea being that players would be rewarded by coins by exploring. The idea was good. The result was not so good, and only by sheer arithmetics. Since my girlfriend is currently doing a contract for revising translations of math schoolbooks, here is the problem:
 
Q1: Little Jimmy wants to beat Super Mario Bros 1. He starts the game with 3 extra lives. He knows that he will need at least 10 extra lives to make it past World 8-2, 8-3, and 8-4. Given that it takes 100 coins to get an extra life, that secret places typically contain 20 coins, and that trying to reach a secret place usually carries a 20% chance of losing a life in the process, what are little Jimmy's chances of success?
 
A: Litte Jimmy is screwed, and should ignore secret places altogether and try to beat World 8-2, 8-3 and 8-4 with less than 10 lives by trying them over and over and memorizing the enemies' patterns.
 
Coins for extra lives seemed like a very valid concept back in the day, but there seldom was enough coins to warrant the risk taken in obtaining them. New Super Mario Bros fixes that by multiplying coins. There are many more, and they are brilliantly used: instead of appearing most of the time in secret places or in blocks, they are laid all over the place, tracing patterns over pits and effectively suggesting "ideal" paths to the player. The result of this is that you get a glimpse into the level designer's thought process, and how he thinks you should progress through the challenges he laid out. This is brilliant. Any long-time Mario fan will likely be struck by the abundance of glitters in this game. And as a result, you want to collect coins, because they're easy to get and plentiful, and thus you get a lot of extra lives with them. Suddenly, they're worth it, and that adds a dimension to the game that should have been in there all along but was merely a ghostly halo, an unfulfilled promise, a marvel that had never been.
 
Another thing that really struck me is what they did with the end-of-level flagposts. You remember them from SMB1, and perhaps from SMB2J ("The Lost Levels" that appeared on the Super NES Mario All-Stars cartridge, not the Doki Doki panic edited for the US market as "Super Mario Bros 2"). In SMB2, you could use a spring to fly over the flagpost in a level, and, congratulating your genius in finding such a secret, you continued to walk past the end fortress, only to come face-to-face with a warp pipe that would take you back to level 2. ("Who's the genius now?", I could almost hear as the devilish pixels on the screen grinned at me) Well, these flagposts were giving you more points the higher you touched them. Big deal. Points. I never understood points. It's one thing when they give you extra lives, but when they're useless, they need to go. They're unnecessarily cluttering the screen, and giving fel armaments to these braggarts who used to take photos of their high scores - back when taking pictures meant spending money on film, let me add in passing - and then pride themselves in their "0867454" points. At least Capcom understood and took out scores from Mega Man 2 onward.
 
So New Super Mario Bros fixes this by offering the player increasing points the higher he touches the flagpost, and an extra life if he gets his feet over the flagpost (Mario still comes down, no secret backwards pipe this time). Okay, it's not totally fixed (you still have *gasp* points! Want to know what my score is? Why would you care anyway?)
 
I must end this review by stating how they tackled the problem of audience. Mario is a long-timer. I've been playing Mario for about 20 years now. How can they offer me something new and interesting and still be able to hook up the 14-year old that got a DS last Christmas? "The ages-old saying, "Easy to beat, difficult to master", which is so overused it says next to nothing, can be mentioned. The stages in New Super Mario Bros are easy to beat, but finding all three Koopa coins is difficult and requires thorough exploration and puzzle-solving. I'm pretty sure I could have been done with the game already if I just wanted to beat it, but the fun for me comes in finding all the Koopa coins in each level. The challenges are built on the old rules of Mario (jumping, throwing shells, hitting switches and running, entering pipes, etc.), but the new elements (mini mario can jump higher and float in the air, you can ground-pound to knock blocks below you, you can wallkick-jump off walls) introduce many new permutations on these old familiars, and tax my comprehension of the game mechanics. My hat off to Nintendo!

Gears of War

It wouldn't be accurate for me to say that I played Gears of War and loved it - it's more like I lived it. I turned on the game on friday two weeks ago, got straight to act IV, then finished it up the next morning - all together, about 12 hours of gaming in a 20-hour time span. This game is so great in a number of ways. The cover system set it apart from the generic, "strafe-dance" first-person shooters, in which you just dance and jump around your opponent and whoever aims or predict the other's movements better wins. The environment is as much a factor in battles as the enemies, which considerably reduces the feeling of repetitiveness that often plagues the shooter genre (for me). A given set of enemies can be anything from easy to extremely hard depending on your tactical ground (dis)advantage and position.
 
The game is labeled a "tactical shooter" and it's not "tactical" as in "try to get your AI partners to do what you want" but rather by the levels' architecture. Since you can duck behind cover and be relatively safe, there's a lot less twitch gameplay and more careful maneuvering and decision-making. It is less about aiming perfectly while moving left and right to avoid being hit than about keeping yourself in a defensive position and forcing your enemies to maneuver dangerously. Typically, I would enter a room, get behind a wall (or anything - but I had a big smile when I first hid behind a piano, and enemy bullets went through it triggering loud snapped strings noises and clunky notes) and try to flank my enemies using my AI teammates. If they move around to match my movements and not get themselves flanked, or try to flank me, then they expose themselves to fire during the time they are advancing to another cover. It becomes a game of movement on a grid, akin to chess. Give me that kind of "tactical" any day!
 
Of course, one cannot speak of GoW without touching on the visuals. If I had to sum up Gears, I'd like to call it "a shooter with a vision". Art direction is well-done, with beautiful environments and ugly monsters who are not overdone. Two things in particular worthy of praise: the camera and the chainsaw-gun effect. Video games seem to be still in their "cinematic envy" infancy. The bulk of most game cut-scenes is shown through a fixed camera shot, which is, as most would suspect, the oldest and simplest use of a camera. The camera in Gears bobbles and wobbles around, pivots, shakes, and so on. This gives an incredible effect of presence to the cut-scenes. The chainsaw-gun effect, as the name implies, comes from the fact that one of your guns has a chainsaw attached to it, and you can "melee"-attack your opponents with it, resulting in an instant kill. Blood splatters the camera as the victim's body falls away in chunks and entrails. The effect is startling and hits spot-on on the lead designer's vision of "intimate violence" that seemed to be, along with "destroyed beauty", the words to define the game.
 
I will say that Gears of War is the best game I have played this year, until Mass Effect proves me wrong (or not). Pacing is perfect, difficulty is fair, the game is short and intense (give me that over "long and OK" any day), there's a variety of weapons that is enough to shuffle things around but not too much so as to render some of them useless or confined to a bizarre, hybrid role, and the game keeps throwing new situations at you regularly ("ride a mine cart!" "stay in the light!" "lure that Berserker out!", etc.) In fact, I just bought the limited edition. (a friend had lent it to me - I will finally get to return it to him!)

Mass Effect

Mass Effect is good, but not awesome. The combat system heavily favors the Soldier class (which is to say, the guy with the big gun who doesn't cast spells or use tech powers), which is a real shame. A real-time shooter engine doesn't particularly lends itself well to the variety of strategic possibilities that a RPG offers, because it is in itself interesting enough and sufficiently hard to master. It also runs counter to the idea of strategy and optimization. Sometimes I would leave a couple of weapons or armor suits in my inventory for a while instead of equipping them, because it didn't seem to make so much of a difference in the heat of combat. My motor skills were the real cookie-cutter.
 
I also did not equip things because you gather them at a ridiculous pace. This is even truer of level-ups. Get this: the main quest can be completed in 12 or 15 hours, and will probably get you up to level 35 or so in the meantime. That's a heck of a lot of level-ups, and each time you're supposed to go in the menu to your "character sheet" and spend a couple of points on some skills. The skills are so simply laid out (there really isn't a "tree" to speak of) that the player has very little choice. Usually you'll check the 7 or 8 possibilities at the beginning of the game, pick one or two skills that will be your priorities, and then for the next 10 levels or so you're good to go. It's just pointless to have you go in the menu and put your point in there every time. Especially considering that you often gain a level just talking to people.
 
Another reason why I didn't really keep track of my inventory is that the inventory menu is so uninviting. Note that this is probably actually a conscious design choice, as BioWare wanted the game to keep a "shooter pace". That's why, as they said in interviews before the game's release, the game will automatically loot everything on a corpse instead of allowing you to choose what you're going to take. By this logic, it would make sense to have a good, detailed and organic menu to skim through the hundreds of items you're "automatically" picking up along the way. But if the menu is too good, the player will spend too much time in the menu, and that would break the shooter pace, so the solution is simple: make the menu as uncomfortable as possible so he or she will want to get out of there as quickly as possible.
 
The game writing is a notch above the industry average, but I was a little disappointed. This isn't KOTOR or Jade Empire caliber. In fact, I am pretty sure I won't remember much of the game in 6 months or so. It just doesn't create a lasting appeal. The dialogue system, however, is interesting. Having the player pick a choice from just a few words and then watching the character speak is a good mechanic, as it leaves room for the character to surprise you - sometimes in a very bad way (Shepard pulls out his gun and shoots the guy! or some such), but that's what makes it interesting. The game positions itself along the idea of a third-person narrative, reminiscent of the FMV games of yore. The player does not become Shepard so much as he influences him.
 
Mass Effect ends up being somewhat of a cross between an average shooter and an average RPG, where the two generic logics often collide. But that's what makes it interesting for me and rest assured, you will read more about it from this author in the future.