I don’t like writing my year-end reviews in the tail end of December. What if something major happens on December 29th? I like to let the year fully pass, mull over it a bit in my mind, before summing it up in a few paragraphs. And if that takes me until February, I don’t mind.

So be glad that it didn’t.

Biggest Disappointment: Nintendo

This was not a good year for Nintendo. First, the 3DS stumbled out of the gate. The price was a little steep (determined by the response from attendees at E3 2010, but still too much for most consumers to swallow), and the best release game was Super Street Fighter IV, an impressive port but still just a port. Pilotwings and Nintendogs were quickly forgotten, and nothing new came for several months. We eventually got Ocarina of Time 3D, and though it was an impressively done re-release, it’s a game we’ve played before. Then came Star Fox 64 3D, another good game but still one we’ve already played. It wasn’t until the last two months of the year that the 3DS finally gave us a new Super Mario game, a new Mario Kart, and a port of Monster Hunter Tri (as good as printing money in Japan), and more quality first-party titles are on the horizon. Still, no third-party game has taken off on the system yet. Then there’s the price cut, pleasing to consumers but scary to investors, and the slide pad add-on, only fueling rumors that a 3DS Lite will come within the year. Certainly not the path you want your newest handheld to take.

Next, there’s the Wii U. It garnered way less anticipation than the 3DS did at its unveiling, probably due to a misdirected presentation that focused almost exclusively on the controller and gave little solid statistics about the system and nothing about games. All we got were a hefty touch-screen controller, HD visuals, third-party support, a handful of demos, and a name that is somehow more sexual than its predecessor’s. We can only hope that Nintendo will learn from the 3DS’s launch and put more quality games earlier in the console’s lifetime. And put in a good online system.

Finally, there was the Wii. And by the Wii, I mean Skyward Sword. What else was there on the Wii this year? Just Dance 3? Zumba Fitness? Kirby’s Return to Dream Land doesn’t count, because it should have been released as a GameCube game six years earlier. Now, Skyward Sword is very nice, but it feels so hollow after the spectacular winter we had last year. It’s little surprise that the third-parties have given up on the Wii, but it was disappointing to see that Nintendo had nothing to offer us loyal fans.

Well, they did, but they weren’t willing to give it to us. There was a trio of three games, Xenoblade, Last Story, and Pandora’s Tower, that were released in Japan in the last couple years that probably didn’t have the greatest chance of being localized, but looked like the last decent games Wii owners could hope to get. Despite the huge fan project Rainfall, Nintendo of America seemed adamantly against bringing them to the US. Then we heard that Europe would be getting all three of them (a startling reversal from the SNES RPG days; e.g. Europe never got Chrono Trigger until the DS port). And then came reports that Xenoblade was the best JRPG of the last five years, sending fans into a frenzy and causing numerous news stories about Wii emulators and Wii hacks to play any region’s discs. Thankfully, NOA has agreed to bring Xenoblade here, and we can only hope that its commercial success (you will help buy it, right?) will encourage them to bring the other two over.

That would mean that next year, the year the Wii’s successor will (probably) enter the market, could have more quality Wii games than this year. *sigh* Nintendo, why did you strain my heart so hard this year?

Best Software Lineup: Everyone else’s

Seriously, this was a fantastic year to be a gamer. It started out strong, a spring to remember with Dead Space 2, LittleBigPlanet 2, the fifth Pokemon generation, Okamiden, Dissidia 012, Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Portal 2, and Mortal Kombat. The summer was a little slow, with the surprising Catherine followed by the successfully updated Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the beautiful El Shaddai in August, before the fall hit. It was one of the greatest falls ever: Gears of War 3, Batman: Arkham City, Battlefield 3, Uncharted 3, Skyrim, Super Mario 3D Land, Rayman Origins, Saints Row: The Third, Skyward Sword, and Mario Kart 7.

Even the DS had a spectacular year, despite its successor hitting the market. I already mentioned Pokemon Black/White and Okamiden, but the DS also got Ghost Trick (the one thing Capcom got right), Radiant Historia, Kirby: Mass Attack, another Professor Layton game, Aliens: Infestation, and a couple Dragon Quest games. I think that’s more good games than the 3DS got this year!

Biggest Surprise: Team Fortress 2

When I was in high school, one of my favorite ways to hang out with friends was playing video games. There was plenty of N64 goodness (Smash Bros. and Diddy Kong Racing), and, once we all got computers, LAN parties. That meant FPSes, with Halo and Quake 3 and a little Unreal Tournament. It was so much fun, but I didn’t do it as much once I went off to college. I didn’t know it, but there was a little gaming hole in my life, until this summer.

Out of nowhere, Valve made one of their big shooters a free-to-play game. I’d never really paid much attention to the game before, but with nothing to lose, I gave it a try. Since then, I’ve put over a hundred and thirty hours into it, a record that has probably only been broken by my Brawl playtime (two hundred twenty-something hours, but I’m sure TF2 will catch up). Part of it was tapping into that FPS-LAN party mentality, but the rest is that it’s a damn good game!

I love the different classes, each with a unique play style. They range from offensive to defensive, fast to slow, straightforward to sneaky, and no two classes play alike. This means that everyone can find a play style they like, or they could be like me and play someone different each day, depending on their mood. Add to that a ton of different weapons, with more being added every month, and you can customize your character to play exactly the way you want.

Even Better 25th Anniversary: Legend of Zelda

Last year, Mario got, what, one new game? And a bunch of parties and a reissue of a SNES compilation? Not bad, but they really brought it to the table for Zelda. There was Skyward Sword, a revolutionary new title in the series. Ocarina of Time was released for the 3DS, with completely redone graphics, and Four Swords came as a free download for the handheld, with wireless functionality (which it always needed) and new levels themed on old Zelda games. There was a wicked sweet Zelda-themed 3DS. And to cap it all off, a symphony tour that’s running into this year. Now that’s how you celebrate. Who’s anniversary is next year?

It all started ten years earlier, when the Nintendo 64 was being developed. Nintendo chose to stick with cartridges instead of the new-fangled disc media coming out at the time. Though I applaud them for choosing zero load times, there were plenty of restrictions to cartridges. They had much less capacity than discs, which hurt at a time when 3-D games were coming onto the scene, filled with huge texture files and polygonal models. Western developers were able to cope with the restraints well enough. All the sports games, racing games, and shooters were able to come out on the N64, though occasionally sacrifices had to be made (e.g. the N64 Spider-Man lost the cutscenes).

RPG developers, however, wanted the extra storage space of compact discs. They wanted to make game experiences that lasted dozens of hours and spanned a multitude of locations, and the N64 cartridges just couldn’t handle it. That’s why RPG makers and several other Japanese companies completely abandoned the Nintendo console. Square, Enix, Capcom, Atlus, and just about every other RPG maker flocked to the PS1 with their games.

A (game) generation passes, and Nintendo comes out with the GameCube. They make the move to disc media (though a smaller size to discourage copying), but it wasn’t enough. It allowed them to stay abreast of all the cross-platform releases, but the Japanese RPG developers had fallen in love with Sony and stuck with the PS2. It was arguably a second golden-age of the JRPG, and Nintendo wasn’t privy to any of it. But still, any Western game you wanted to play would likely be on the GameCube as well.

Then we get to the Wii, where Nintendo jumped off the deep end into the motion gaming pool. They also stayed in standard definition while the competitors went to HD, and their controller was completely different from everyone else’s, with fewer buttons and only one analog stick. This meant that Western games could no longer be easily ported to the Wii. Most developers didn’t want to spend the time extensively remapping controls and downgrading their graphics to work on the Wii’s inferior hardware, the only exceptions being licensed games (and most of those were crappy, barring the Lego games).

This meant that Wii owners missed out on all the notable games of the generation, like the BioShock series, Batman: Arkham series, Skyrim, the fighting game renaissance (Tatsunoko vs. Capcom is a small consolation), Portal 2, almost all of the great downloadable games, most shooters (they did get Metroid Prime, a GoldenEye remake, and crappy Call of Duty ports), and more. The first-party games were still great, but if you had been a Nintendo kid since the N64 or earlier, you had grown up by now, and your tastes had probably matured as well. Unfortunately, you’d have to buy another system in order to experience the stellar lineup of games this generation (which is what my brother had to do). Meanwhile, the JRPG developers were...still working with the PS2 or the PSP, unless they were rich enough (Square Enix) to develop in HD. Either way, the Wii was lacking in both Western and Eastern games. The community noticed, blasting the Wii for its abandonment of the “core gamer.”

It is thus either incredible luck, incredible genius, or incredible misfortune that the Wii was a huge success and outsold both of its competitors. Motion gaming let Nintendo tap into a huge new market of gamers, and their first-party games were more than enough to turn them a profit. It was so successful, Sony and Microsoft have tried to copy them, with varying and debatable degrees of success. A lack of mainstream games and “core” gamer respect is apparently no deterrent to making money.

Still, I am glad to see the direction Nintendo is taking with the Wii U. While still building off the strong Wii brand, they’re trying to court the third-party games back. The controller is more traditional (while keeping support for Wiimotes) with an exciting new touch screen, the visuals move to high definition, and they might even have a better online system. Time will tell whether the common JRPG will move to HD systems, but if the Wii U can build up a serious library of Western games again, then hopefully it won’t be the joke its predecessor was for the gaming community.

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2011 in Review post will be coming soon!

Happy Thanksgiving! I offer you a blog post to feast upon (okay, that metaphor was lame, moving on).

Be warned, this post will contain spoilers. I’ll try to leave boss strategies in the dark, but I’m sure you’ll pick up some information you didn’t want to. Or, if you have finished these games, sit back and reminisce with me on some of the best final fights that games have given us.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – Ganondorf

This is, to me, the classic final boss. Ganondorf has been the evil present throughout the entire story, the force working against you at every point. He even whoops your ass in the past. So the anticipation is great as you climb that final staircase to face him once and for all.

It starts off a little slow, a rehash of an earlier boss fight (which is itself a rehash of a boss fight from Link to the Past), though tougher this time around and with an extra wrinkle you have to figure out. But then, once you appear to have won, Ganondorf brings the whole castle crashing down on you, and like a great game, it makes you play through it. You have only a few minutes to run back down through the tower, including a tense sword fight in the middle of it.

However, it is after you finally escape that the best part happens. Ganondorf reappears and, in a wordless display of his power, uses his Triforce to turn into Ganon. Your Master Sword is knocked away, you have no idea where his weak point is, and epic music plays as you engage in the last fight of the game.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker – Ganondorf (again)

The only downside to this fight is that it isn’t followed by a Ganon fight (after this is teased so much in the architecture). Otherwise, in a game that prided itself on making more complicated sword combat, the Ganondorf fight is its crowning achievement. He is the first enemy in the game that won’t fall for a simple trick like rolling around him. It will take all of your dexterity and parrying skills to just land a hit on him.

Another great twist in the fight is how it involves Zelda. This was the first Zelda game that included cooperating with other characters, so it makes sense that this is the first boss fight where you have to work with someone else to take it down. There’s also really nice progression to this fight, as you have to change up your tactics as it goes along.

It says something that the final boss of Twilight Princess also tried to borrow from this fight, but couldn’t do nearly as good of a job of it.

Super Mario 64 – Bowser

What makes this final boss so good is how it builds on all of the previous Bowser fights in the game. The premise is the same as it was so obviously stated in the first Bowser fight: grab Bowser and fling him at a bomb. The second fight added some more twists, like tilting the playing field and Bowser being harder to grab. The third and final fight is the best culmination of everything that came before. Bowser has more attacks this time around, including a few that linger on the field. You have to throw him at three bombs in order to defeat him, which gets tougher as you have fewer bombs to aim at as you keep playing. And once you get to the final hit, the playing field falls apart to form a star, which means that you have to have great aim to hit a bomb (as opposed to the throw-Bowser-a-small-distance-and-then-pick-him-back-up-until-we’re-close-to-a-bomb approach).

Honorable mention goes to the Super Mario Galaxy final boss. It’s a lengthy fight and introduces some new elements, while also integrating elements from previous fights. It just doesn’t have quite the iconic nature of the SM64 final boss.

Okami – Yami

This fight is epic in every sense. First, it’s long, taking a half-hour to do all of it. You’ll fight five different forms, each with different patterns and weaknesses, and have plenty of occasion to use all those items you’ve been saving through the whole game. There’s even a touching cutscene in the middle of the battle, which ties into the fight while resolving a character that left earlier.

Second, this fight manages to make every brush power you learned in the game relevant again. And since there are thirteen of them, that is impressive. It’s hard to imagine restoration or blooming being useful in a boss fight, but it happens. There’s a great sense of progression, because as you damage each boss’s form, you gain a power that’s more effective against it. You can start out a form by wildly running around avoiding attacks, but by the end, the brushstrokes you’ve gained have that boss wrapped around your finger. It’s a great feeling of empowerment, even while you’re fighting for your life.

Earthbound – Giygas

Earthbound falls under my RPG rule. Despite the quirky presentation and cult status, it doesn’t offer interesting enough mechanics to make me want to play it. That said, I’ve seen the final boss, and it is one of the best RPG final bosses ever.

It follows the convention set forth by its predecessor, the Japanese-only release Mother for the NES. In that game, you can only defeat the final boss by singing eight verses of a song, while your third party member heals you from the boss’s attacks. It’s a novel concept in an RPG, but Earthbound ratchets it up another notch.

The boss is actually the same alien final boss from the first game (with a differently translated name, if you paid attention), albeit in a different form. He begins encased in the Devil’s Machine, under the care of Pokey, held in a labyrinth of tubes in an apocalyptic future. As you fight Giygas and Pokey, it is your face that pokes out of the Machine, and Giygas uses your own PSI attack against you (the attack that you named with your favorite thing at the beginning of the game). Once you’ve dealt enough damage to Pokey, he exits the fight, but not before releasing Giygas from the Machine, describing him as the terrifying embodiment of pure Evil.

And it delivers. What follows is the most unnerving boss fight ever. Giygas is a warped red swirl, constantly fluctuating while the background music is supremely unsettling. It jabbers nonsense before each attack, the nature of which cannot be comprehended. Regular attacks will eventually prove futile, and like in Mother, the only way to beat this boss is by using an unconventional battle command repeatedly, which culminates in a truly touching fourth-wall breaking moment.

This boss fight is an incredible feat of emotion. It’s a roller coaster ride, unnerving from the start and completely different in tone from the entire rest of the game. This makes it stand out as one of the best RPG bosses ever.

One sentence summation: If it were just a physics simulator, it would be interesting, but it falls short as a game.

The premise is so simple that you wonder how they could even make a game out of it. You are a mass (probably microbiological, though orbital mechanics are introduced later), one of many. There are two rules: a larger mass absorbs a smaller mass, and you can move yourself around by ejecting bits of mass in the opposite direction (making you move, but also making you smaller). The goal of each level is frequently to become the biggest mass or absorb certain targets.

And, surprisingly, they do make a lot of game around that simple premise. There are different types of masses introduced, from attractors (draw masses in and set up the orbital paths) to antimatter (wipe out whatever mass absorbs it) to sentient masses (they move like you and are voracious in their appetite). Lots of levels are presented with different premises, from avoiding fast-moving masses to navigating between solar systems to starting out very small amid huge masses (where it’s best to pit them against each other and absorb the remains) and more. And there’s plenty of polish to the design. Masses are color coded and in a way that lets you know how close they are to your size. Orbital levels will display your future path, color coded on whether it’s safe or not. You can zoom in and zoom out at any time, and also speed up or slow down time.

There’s just one important crucial feature missing: checkpoints or the ability to make save states. It seems an incredibly simple feature, just take a picture of the level at any point and be able to revert to it when things go wrong. Without it, tons of careful movements and calculations can be undone by one stupid mistake. I was playing the last Force level and had gotten to the point where I was bigger than all the other masses other than the attractors. I was in the home stretch, but I made one wrong move when transferring to another solar system and ran straight into an attractor. All my time was wasted. It’s incredibly disheartening to put ten to fifteen minutes into a level and have to start all over again from the beginning.

This ties into the biggest problem with this game. It feels like a puzzle game, with only a few avenues open and choices to make, but these aren’t carefully crafted levels designed to test your acumen. You can randomize the layout of any level. It’s clear that they follow certain rules for what elements are present in what quantity, but there were several levels where I just randomized it until I got a favorable layout.

Going back to my first sentence, this game is a cool setup but it just isn’t fun enough. In addition to having to replay levels way too many times, I would fail or succeed and not understand why. I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but it doesn’t really foster a sense of accomplishment. If only it had checkpoints, I would have felt more encouraged and given this game a whole ‘nother star. But that’s not what happened.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars (Meh)

The best part of Portal is, hands down, the writing. This is impressive, seeing as how there are only two characters, and one of them never speaks! But GLaDOS, the computer A.I. that runs the testing facility, is that interesting. She starts out as a somewhat glitchy guide to your puzzle solving, cutting out mid-warning or delivering off-kilter sentences with that same monotone computerized voice. She calmly tells you that the Material Emancipation Grid you keep walking through could remove your teeth, and that cake and grief counseling will be offered at the conclusion of the test. After a dark turn at the end of the scheduled testing, you spend the rest of the game hunting down and facing GLaDOS as the final boss. The dialogue (monologue?) during that fight is some of my favorite of all games (putting it right up with Star Fox 64, hah!).

The second best part of Portal is the concept. You wield a gun that, instead of shooting bullets, shoots either end of a wormhole. This means that, although it may look like an FPS, it’s actually a puzzle game. There are some very nifty puzzles around this concept, especially when physics gets involved (downward momentum can be translated into forward momentum, making for some soaring leaps). Along the way, you’ll also be redirecting balls of energy, putting cubes on buttons, and avoiding deadly (adorably-voiced) turrets.

The worst part of Portal: the length. It’s clear that this game was only an experiment for Valve. It was a cool idea (itself taken from the student game Narbacular Drop), but they didn’t want to dump a ton of money into an unproven idea (which looks silly in hindsight, but what could they know at the time?). Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that they decided to put a lot of polish into a small game instead of making a longer, unpolished one. But Portal is disappointingly short, especially when you realize that more than half of the test chambers are really just a tutorial. Yes, it’s nice being eased into the strange new ideas portals bring, but couldn’t you have come up with more to do afterwards? After beating the game, there are advanced test chambers (remakes of earlier test chambers made harder) and challenges (beating test chambers while being scored in any of three areas, to standards that are ridiculously high), but they’re just more of the same. Maybe I’d give five stars to the Xbox Live version that has added maps (with a couple added puzzle elements), but the normal Steam/Orange Box version only gets four.



The good news is that the writing meets or exceeds the standards of the first, and with three times as many characters! GLaDOS makes a wonderful return, deliciously bitter about the outcome of the previous game and eager to make biting remarks about it, but she goes through a transformation over the course of the sequel. Wheatley is endearing as your delightfully bumbling companion who can’t get anything right but you love him anyway. And Cave Johnson, the founder of Aperture Science, makes an appearance...through prerecorded messages. J.K. Simmons does a fantastic job as him, making him unforgettable in a small amount of time. The story itself is nice, having a couple of twists along the way.

The other good news is that they’ve added more to the game. It’s longer, though not by a whole lot (I beat the single-player campaign in six-and-a-half hours). However, they’ve added a lot of new elements to it. The bouncing energy ball has been replaced with a laser, which is much easier to immediately redirect through portals (and can be redirected through lens cubes). There’s also hard-light bridges, aerial faith plates (a.k.a. bounce pads), excursion funnels, bouncy gels, speedy gels, and portal-surface gels (woefully underused). Each of these is used in several different ways from navigating the environment to manipulating momentum and more.

There are plenty of other little small improvements. I don’t think I ever left behind an object as I went through a portal. Falling objects are no longer lethal. The graphics and environments are of course bigger and more detailed. The puzzles outside of the test environments feel a lot more natural (I think the feeling of decay might help with that). There are even a couple puzzles that don’t require thinking with portals, but simply thinking.

The bad news is the puzzles. There is a nice rhythm to them. Less time is spent introducing the basic concepts. Each new element is introduced to you, a couple puzzles demonstrate what you can do with it, and then you move on to the next element. The pacing is more relaxed and enjoyable, but it also means that the puzzle elements are never pushed as far as they can go. For instance, you’re never required to redirect a horizontal laser to go vertically. Also, there are no puzzles that require timing or quick reflexes. It feels a lot like the game was dumbed down.

The key difference is that, in the first Portal, puzzles were defined by where you couldn’t place portals. Non-portalable walls were put wherever it would break the idea of the puzzle, but the rest of the surfaces were free territory, even when most of it wasn’t useful and just a red herring. In Portal 2, though, puzzles are defined by where you can place portals. Maybe this is tying into the decay theme, but you’re fairly limited to where you can put portals. This means that there are fewer red herrings and the answers become more obvious. I would walk into a room, see what all of my options were, and put the solution together from that.

Thankfully, all of this changes when you reach the co-op. I don’t know if it’s just that adding two additional portals to puzzles makes them intrinsically more interesting, or if that’s where Valve decided to put their actually hard puzzles. I will say that, with many of these puzzles are broken up so that they have to be completed by two people, it makes it harder to see all the elements at once. My only regret is that this section isn’t longer; I think I spent less time on it than the single-player, but it felt infinitely more enriching.

Either way, the co-op is what saves this game. Without it, the single-player is nothing but a tutorial. A highly enjoyable tutorial, but nonetheless not a full game. It’s the same problem they had with the first game, so it’s annoying to see it remain. However, I can’t deny that the sequel is an improvement. So, I’m going to break with tradition and give this game a half-star ranking. I don’t want to use half-stars too much, but I feel it a necessity here.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (So Amazingly Close)

I went through an emotional roller coaster when playing this game. At the start, it felt too familiar, too much like a rehash of the first game (even after the point that was literally a rehash, and quite enjoyably so). Then I hit the second act, and started to get excited again for the new environment and character dynamics, even after the predictable plot twist. Next, the third act arrived and we went back to the same old setting and the puzzles still weren’t getting that devious. Finally, the ending hit, which left me feeling very unresolved. But hopefully, when Portal 3 comes, it will fix all of these problems and be the perfect entry that this series deserves.

This week, Netflix announced that it would be splitting into two companies, one handling online streaming and the other handling DVD rental. As someone who’s used Netflix for the last two years to replace my cable, I’ve found this decision confusing.

First, the two services work together so well. With the company splitting into two different websites, we won’t be able to look through our queue and see what’s available for immediate viewing (and then delete it off our physical queue after we’ve watched it). To get accurate recommendations at both sites, you’ll have to rate movies twice. And now there’ll be an extra charge to write down in my checkbook each month (yeah, I’m old-fashioned and use a checkbook).

Second, I don’t really see the point. Netflix says that it’s so each side can be made better, but this doesn’t make sense. As I just said, the two services work so well together. I don’t see how separating them improves either service. Certainly improving servers or making more movies available can be done with the company as it was.

Ultimately, I think Netflix made this decision because it expects one side of the company to fail. My money’s on the DVD side, what with the USPS going down and DVDs going out of style. However, they might also be afraid of competing cable services and streaming websites nudging them out of the market. Either way, I’m sure that the company split is them hedging their bets and not wanting the failure of one branch to take down the whole company.

And either way, it’s an inconvenience to me. Not enough to make me quit the service (not like I like any of their competitors better), but just causing that tiny seed of resentment in the back of my head.

EDIT: Thankfully, Netflix has ditched this idea and will be remaining a single company. Way to figure it out, Netflix. Good job.

My RPG rule: I will only play an RPG if it offers something interesting, something more than just choosing Attack or Magic from a menu. Valkyrie Profile has an action-oriented combat system. Atelier Iris 2 has two different attacks to choose from, one that powers up your skills and another that delays the enemy’s turn (the other games in the series don’t have this, so I don’t want to play them). The one exception to this rule is the Final Fantasy series, which has the right atmosphere, polish, and legacy (and also is quite varied from game to game) to make it worth playing.

This is the reason why I don’t want to play Super Mario RPG. It may be a joint Nintendo-Square production, but it feels like mostly Square. Sure, you can push buttons during an attack to deal additional damage, but that isn’t enough to set the game apart. Paper Mario, on the other hand, blows the mold wide open and is filled with refreshing changes to the standard RPG formula.

First, Mario has two different attacks he can use, each with strengths and weaknesses. Being Mario, he can jump on his enemies. This has some nice interactions, like flipping over shelled enemies and making them vulnerable, but it can’t be used on spiked enemies. His other option is a hammer, which can hit the spiked enemies but its target selection is limited to the first enemy on the ground. Additionally, each weapon has a different method of inflicting extra damage. Jumping requires a timed button press that takes about half the game to get used to, while the hammer just requires you to hold the analog stick to the left. It’s a lot easier to get extra damage with the hammer, but jumping is still required to hit enemies in certain spots. It’s a nicely balanced system.

Another wrinkle to the combat is your partner. There are eight you gain over the course of the game, and they can be switched out at any time, even during battle (as long as you’re willing to wait a turn). Each of them has special attacks in battle, as well as an impressively variety of methods for inflicting extra damage, ranging from copying Mario’s methods to mashing the analog stick to timing a strike and more. Also, each of them has an ability they can use outside of battle. Even though each is highlighted most often when the partner first makes their appearance, they get touched upon enough later in the game so that no one feels forgotten.

More customization for your battle strategy comes with the multitude of badges you can equip. They offer a plethora of effects, from passive abilities to special attacks. And finally, whenever you level up, you can choose which of Mario’s stats is increased. Your choices are Hit Points, Flower Points (i.e. Magic Points), or Badge Points (determines how many badges you can wear). During the whole adventure, you’re free to mold your team however you think it will serve you best.

One of the best adjustments to the RPG formula that this game makes is reducing all the numbers involved. Your normal RPG has characters with HP in the thousands and dealing up to 9999 damage with each attack. In Paper Mario, rarely will you see a number higher than fifty. This means that all the numbers are much more relatable. When you run into an enemy with a defense of two after fighting defenses of one, you can see how much less damage you’re doing (if any). It just makes everything a lot easier to understand, while also increasing the anticipation for that new item that’ll increase your defense or attack.

My favorite change, though, is that this game has no grinding. Literally. As you increase in level, you get less experience from the enemies you defeat, eventually reaching nothing if you’re too high a level. This makes it impossible to over-level, but it also means that the game has been designed so you don’t have artificially increase your level in order to progress. There are none of the sudden difficulty spikes you find in so many other RPGs (I’m looking at you, Pokemon).

But this rich battle system would go to waste if you didn’t have good enemies to fight against, and Paper Mario exceeds in this regard. The developers (Intelligent Systems, give them some credit) took the rich catalogue of Mario baddies and turned them into an equally rich field of enemies to fight. There are shelled enemies that you can flip over and weaken by jumping on them, enemies that self-destruct, enemies that spawn more enemies, enemies that buff other enemies, enemies that inflict status ailments, enemies that resurrect themselves, enemies that cling to the ceiling, enemies that charge up super attacks, and many more. Best of all are the bosses, each of which requires its own strategy to defeat (the exception is the final boss, which unfortunately falls into the typical RPG stereotype of a huge tank of a final boss).

Housing these enemies are some truly inventive dungeons. You’ll be finding keys for doors, draining sand from rooms, sneaking around, riding trains in a toy box, trading items with flowers, and some particularly clever puzzles with mirrors. Each dungeon you visit has its own set of puzzles to solve, something you don’t normally find in an RPG. Also, each dungeon has its own distinct look and feel, making the player look forward to each new area they’ll be exploring.

Perhaps most important is that this game feels like a Mario game. Unlike Super Mario RPG, which borrowed a few characters, this truly feels like it takes place in the Mario universe. It may have you teaming up with Goombas and Koopas, so it doesn’t replace the standard Super Mario canon, but it has that same bounce and feel to it. Each character is fun to run into, especially Peach and Bowser, who finally get the deep characterization that they’ve lacked for so long. And the paper cutout art style is a joy, too.

One sentence summation: I stayed up until 4 A.M. to beat this game (half of this is because the final dungeon is twice as long as any other, the other half is that it’s a great game).

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars (Gushing)

One sentence summation: Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

You know, J.J. Abrams used to be a very bankable name. Alias, Lost, Cloverfield, Fringe, and the Star Trek reboot cemented his name in the annals of science-fiction. Until Super 8 comes out of left field with how terrible it is. It’s in the so-bad-it’s-good way, not MST3K bad but so enjoyably awful. I do not regret seeing it in theaters, but I did not expect it to be that bad.

Set (rather convincingly) in the 70’s, the film follows a group of middle-schoolers who are filming a zombie horror movie on their Super 8 camera (hence, the name of the film). While filming at a train station, a truck runs head-on into a passing Air Force train and derails it, releasing the alien inside. The rest of the film has the army trying to find the alien while the Midwestern townspeople are trying to figure out what the hell is going on.  At the same time, the main character is trying to get with this chick he has a crush on, and get over his mother’s death that happened four months previous while she was taking a shift for the chick’s drunken deadbeat dad. It’s a story we’ve all seen before, but offers surprisingly little innovative about it.

The first problem is that the action scenes are so ridiculously over-the-top. The train derailment is ludicrous, with train cars flying everywhere, stuff exploding every second (including the train station, when a train car goes through it), and debris flying all around the kids. And yet, all of them survive unscathed (or, at least, with nothing that requires hospitalization or alerts their parents), the camera they dropped by the train station only gets a little beat up, and the car they drove in is completely untouched. Even the guy who drove his truck into the train survives, quite the worse for wear but how did he not die? There’s a second scene later in, when the army is attacking the alien (presumably, because we don’t actually see it during this part) in the town and blows up tons of stuff, all while the kids are once again running through it. I’m as willing to suspend my disbelief as the next guy (probably more, actually), but these scenes are just too over-the-top to be believable, especially since everybody lives through them without even minor injuries.

The alien is lame. Was I the only one who thought that the cloud of metal cubes in the trailer was the alien? Now that would have been refreshingly interesting. But no, the cubes are just the material that makes up the alien’s spaceship, and the alien looks like any other alien in a film in the last couple years. Also, the alien has the ability to telepathically communicate with anyone it touches, and everyone it does this with claims that, “oh, it’s not a bad guy; it just wants to get home!” But that doesn’t stop it from apparently eating people, and it doesn’t stop people it’s touched from running away screaming when it chases them. It’s an incongruous image, which means that we never develop sympathy for the character, despite the movie telling us that we should be sympathetic.

Another odd character is the drunken deadbeat dad. When you first see him, you get the distinct impression that he’s sexually assaulting his daughter, but this vibe isn’t touched again for the rest of the film. Also, we’re told a lot that he gets in frequent trouble with the law, but we’re never shown this. We see him walked through the police station, but with no explanation for why he’s there. As far as we know, he just gets drunk a lot, but that doesn’t jive with the super creepy vibe he gives off half the time.

The air force is completely incompetent. They fail to find a car that they took tire impressions of, they search a guy’s house but don’t think of checking the trailer he keeps on school grounds, they evacuate the town but let a group of kids and their stoner driver sneak back in, they let the town policemen discover the frequency they’re communicating on, and the main character’s father impersonates an officer for the last half hour of the film. Oh, and their attempt to fight the alien just blows up half the town. It’s the cliché fumbling military on full display here.

All of this culminates in the cop-out ending. The alien touches the main character and learns to deal with tough times (“The military was mean to me!”). Then the spaceship engine it’s been building out of Seventies appliances spontaneously starts working, so it flies home. And that’s where it ends. There are superficial resolutions of all the conflicts in the movie, and we never see the air force try to explain why half the town is rubble. It’s the laziest movie ending I’ve ever seen.

The saving grace of this movie is the acting. Oh, the adults are pretty two-dimensional, but the kid actors are great. Each of them has a set of idiosyncrasies that set them apart. They act just like you’d expect kids that age to act, though perhaps with more swearing than I remember (I didn’t know you could say s--- that many times in a movie and still get a PG-13 rating). The high point of the film is definitely watching their zombie horror film playing over the credits at the end.

What’s worst about this movie is that it’s a bundle of clichés. Over-the-top action pieces, confusing characters, a bland menacing alien, the incompetent military, and everything else combines to make this an underwhelming film. Hell, E.T. was more innovative than this. That said, it was highly entertaining, even if for all the wrong reasons. When a movie sparks a half-hour conversation about how bad it was afterwards, it can’t have been a total loss.

BONUS SECTION: I also saw the trailer for the next Twilight movie, and here is my summary of it:
1. Edward and what’s-her-face get married.
2. Edward and whozeewhatee have sex constantly, whenever and wherever possible.
3. She gets pregnant, because they probably weren’t using protection (can you tell this was written by a Mormon?).
I’d hope that somebody would learn a lesson from this, but I know that’s not going to happen...

One sentence summation: This is a classic RPG?!?

There’s a single redeeming quality to this game: the music. But then, the Mana/Seiken Densetsu series is known for having great music. The rest of this game, unfortunately, is complete and utter crap.

To start with, the character designs are terrible. The main character has the goofiest (and floofiest) haircut I’ve ever seen, the female character is a generic female, and the third member is a fluffball of indecipherable gender. The story does nothing to help these characters, and in fact doesn’t do much of anything. You travel to a lot of places with names you can’t remember, and go through a lot of really quick, inconsequential events. There’s one place where you show up and everyone says that the King is acting weird. It only takes five seconds to travel through the castle, talk to the King, and realize that it’s an imposter. The only good part in the story is when you discover the identity of the main character’s parents, which ties into existing universe lore.

However, these are just surface problems. As we probe further, we find many deeper flaws. The Mana series is normally an action RPG, even if the action feels almost exactly like a beat-em-up (in fact, it’s often a lot fairer, not relying on quarter-eating gimmicks). For whatever reason, Secret of Mana tosses this aside and introduces a stamina meter. After every attack, your stamina immediately goes down to 0%, and that’s exactly how much damage you’ll do if you try attacking again. Instead, you have to wait a couple seconds to get back to 100%. Even attacking at 50% feels like you do way too little damage. So the traditional beat-em-up feel is broken, as you fall into a jilted rhythm of attacking, running away to wait for your stamina to refill, rushing back in to attack, and repeating endlessly.

Many parts of the game feel buggy. Hit detection can be off, especially on bosses with huge sprites (but for some reason, you can’t just hit them in the legs). This problem is compounded because it takes so long to attack again after missing. Also, the game has problems registering two people attacking an enemy at once. It’ll sometimes just show the damage from one attack only, which sucks when the attack it counts is the one that does a lot less damage. And when you get attacked, the recoil from being attacked is ridiculously long. It’s very easy to be juggled by the enemy. You can’t even access the menu when being hit or disabled by a status effect, preventing you from possibly saving yourself.

There are also a slew of bizarre design choices. You can only carry four of an item at a time, which really sucks before you get magic. The world map is almost impossible to navigate, though this is remedied by the company including a map with the physical game (sucks for you, Virtual Console players). There are eight weapons to choose from, but there’s barely a difference between them. Some of them are distance weapons, and a few are used to pass obstacles, but I just stuck with the same weapon for each character through the whole game.

The Mana series isn’t always a paragon of video gaming, but it’s never sucked as bad as this. The wonky combat, buggy mechanics, and nonexistent story suck all the enjoyment out of the game. The only reason I finished it is because I overleveled by grinding on tougher enemies that spawned easier enemies (grinding is harder to do, because all enemies leave an area after you defeat the boss, so I was fortunate). Most of the game was a cakewalk after that, which is the only way I could stomach it (giving my partners distance weapons also helped, keeping them out of harm’s way). It’s so sad that this game was localized to America, while its sequel, Seiken Densetsu 3, was passed on and is unknown to most American gamers.

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars (Crap)  

We’ll talk today about two Wiiware titles that I played on the PC (thanks, Steam).

And Yet It Moves

How does one judge a downloadable game? Of course you could describe this game as short, and it is, since you can finish it in a whole afternoon, but the same is true for most downloadable games. It makes sense, since you’re paying less money than you would for a retail game. What’s more important is the level of polish and ingenuity present in that short time the game is with you. Games like Shatter excel in those regards, while games like NyxQuest come up short. And Yet It Moves falls right in the middle.

This game is built around a cool mechanic: in addition to normal player movement, you can also rotate the entire game world. This makes for some very interesting level design, since few other games let you walk on the ceiling. Momentum is also conserved while rotating, which feels wrong at first but makes for some nifty maneuvers once you get the hang of it.

Around this central mechanic, you’ll find a large variety of challenges. You’ll face platforms that phase in and out (though nothing as hard as Mega Man), platforms that only appear when the level is oriented a certain way, swings, manipulation of gravity, fire, swaying tree branches, rotating structures, and more. You’ll run into few enemies along the way, but the ones you do run into have interesting and varied ways of dealing with them. At the end of the game, you feel like you’ve explored a healthy and full amount of ideas, unlike when you finish NyxQuest.

The visual style finishes the package. There is no story; instead, you are a sketch trying to get...somewhere (I don’t know, there’s no story!). The environment feels like it’s made up of cut-up magazine pictures, and the blank spaces are the death traps. What little music occurs is non-intrusive and quite relaxing. In fact, the whole game has a very relaxing feel to it. Also cool is that each checkpoint (a silhouette of your character) will point in the direction that you need to go next, which is quite helpful in a game where any cardinal direction is a possibility.

If I would voice a complaint, it’d be that it’s a little too easy to die. Fall a touch too fast or miss one platform (once you fall into the air, you will never reduce your speed before hitting the ground) and you’re doomed. Fortunately, the respawning process is quick and painless. It just happens a lot. And also, the game is short. After beating the game, all you have is one bonus level and speedruns to do. If you’re going to buy this game, expect it to last just one or two afternoons. They will be a very relaxing, enjoyable, and fulfilling afternoons, but that’s it.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars (Really Good)



BIT.TRIP BEAT

One word summation: Retro

It starts with the premise: this game is Pong, one of the earliest games in the book. You bounce blocks off a paddle. However, this is the most fantastic Pong you will ever play, because of the huge variety of blocks. You have blocks with different speeds, blocks that come at an angle, blocks that twirl through the air, blocks that bounce off walls, blocks that redirect, blocks that blink, blocks that form larger shapes, blocks that freeze your paddle, and more. They drew an amazing number of ideas from this simple starting point (along with Shatter, we’ve had some really good games lately that reinvent old games).

The other retro element is the difficulty. It’s freaking hard. You’ll have incredibly complicated patterns of blocks thrown at you, and then they get more complicated. This is made even worse by the visual overload happening at every turn. From the trippy backgrounds to the flashy effects that are added when you’re doing well, it can be a chore to even tell where the blocks are coming from, but that’s just part of the difficulty. One last retro touch is that failing at any point will send you back to the beginning of the whole level, and these levels are fifteen or more minutes long.

Still, the game is less unforgiving than you might think. Doing poorly sends you to nether mode, where all the fancy effects, music, and color are removed (though this occasionally makes it harder, since block color can give you information on how it will act), giving you the time to concentrate and get back into the game. You can enter this mode as many times as possible, as only failing this mode will kick you out of the level. Also, much of the game is based around pattern recognition. If you pay attention, you’ll see how some of the super complicated patterns just require the same motions you were making earlier. In that retro fashion, this game values pure polished skill, developed from playing the levels over and over and learning all of their tricks (or enough to get out of nether mode each time).

Still, I find it hard to give a score to this game. This appeals to a certain audience, one that thrives in a punishing environment. It’s hard to give this game top billing, but I don’t want to ignore the love and brilliance that went into making this game. I don’t know how often I’ll play this game after I beat it, but I know that I certainly enjoyed the ride it took me on. It certainly garnered enough of my attention to make me want to check out the rest of the series.

Finally, I’d recommend the game on PC (or maybe 3DS, depending on the control scheme it uses). The mouse is much better for controlling the paddle than tilting a Wiimote.

Rating: Screw you, I don’t need to give a rating to every game I review.