Per Nintendo Power, volume 243 (July '09):

Throughout your travels, you'll earn panels that represent items, magic, special abilities, weapon upgrades, and more. To add one of those things to your arsenal, you simply place the corresponding panel on the grid. You have a limited number of slots, however, and you can't alter the grid during a mission, so you have to decide beforehand which panels will be the most useful. Each item and spell requires its own panel, so if you want three Potions, for instance, you'll need to equip three Potion panels. Additionally, certain panels fill more than one slot. Fortunately, the size of your grid increases as you level up.

Interesting system - other games have done equipment/skills in the form of items, which usually sucks, but doing it the other way around may just be crazy enough to work.

Oh, and:

Up to four people can embark on standalone, multiplayer-specific missions [...] Each participant can choose to play as any member of Organization XIII [...] beginning players who haven't acquired many panels yet can elect to sign on as a guest and purchase panels with a given budget. It's important to keep an even playing field, because these multiplayer shenanigans have both a cooperative and a competitive element, a la The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords. [...] When the dust settles, whoever has the most gems wins a Mission Crown, which you can trade in for special prizes back in the story mode.

This multiplayer sounds awesome. It's too bad I'll never be able to play it, because it's local-only and no one I know will buy this game.

I hadn't even heard of this thing until I saw a mini-review of it nestled in the back of a month-old Nintendo Power I was catching up on. The review indicated that the makers of Black Sigil had perhaps been inspired by Chrono Trigger. The 5.0/10 review wasn't exactly favorable, but uttering the words 'Chrono' and 'Trigger' in the same sentence isn't something I take lightly. Go on, take a look.

Is there a word between "uncanny" and "stolen?" I've been trying to think of one, but haven't so far.

I seriously suspect that this game began life as a ROM hack for Chrono Trigger, and that the final product may or may not use a Super NES emulator as part of its "engine." Really, this is hilarious. I mean even the level/terrain designs look like they've been lifted directly from CT and/or other 16-bit Square RPGs.

That said, if you're going to carbon-copy a game, Chrono Trigger is an ideal candidate. And coming out of the gate dirt cheap doesn't hurt, either. Apparently this just came out like yesterday, so I'll hold off for a bit just to confirm that the game is actually playable. Hopefully they aren't cease-and-desisted first! Bahahahaha.

I don't know if the game actually got more challenging, or if I'm just taking a different approach - but I actually had a lot of fun with level 2. The boss fight, too, was very cool, although I'm not sure if I did it right. Level 3 provided a good break from the action in the form of motorcycle-riding mayhem, followed by an on-foot boss encounter that really threw me for a loop, but I was able to get through it with an extra life.

In level 4, I didn't realize until about 15-20 minutes in that I was supposed to climb the walls of buildings to get inside. And then at the boss, I didn't figure out (or rather, see) the right strategy until I was already approaching a game over. When it challenges you, the game is definitely fun, but the black and white aesthetic does detract from it, for lack of visual assistance in figuring the game out. I'll just have to look harder, I guess.

Unfortunately, game voice-overs are only fun so long as they don't broken-record themselves, and that's what the announcers started to do as early as level 2. It got almost unbearable in level 3, when they kept spouting the same "Jack can't ride ride a motorcycle" quip every 30 seconds. Hearing new stuff from them is hilarious, but I wish they wouldn't repeat themselves so much.

Progress: Level 4: Great Wall Street

It's a DS Metroidvania. Surprise!

The art style is supposedly different, replacing the last couple entries' "anime" aesthetic with a more western look, like the first two GBA titles - but really, who cares about this? And the weaponization system, Glyphs, is extremely similar to the Souls from Aria/Dawn of Sorrow (each kind of enemy can drop one, and you equip them to a face button). The world map, with play divided into discrete areas, is kind of new and gives the game a little sense of adventure, but is also an exacerbation of Portrait of Ruin's multitude of trivial sub-worlds.

What's getting me about Ecclesia is the difficulty. It started out super-easy, but within three or four levels, enemies were doing a ludicrous amount of damage to me. The second boss was a humongous pain in the ass, and probably took me a good 5-10 minutes to wear down (not counting deaths and retries). It seems like enemies are becoming stronger faster than I am... which is a bit concerning.

Progress: 14.6%

You'd be forgiven for mistaking Sin and Punishment 2 for the original game, and not just because they appear to play similarly - they appear similar, this guy not exactly pushing the boundaries of modern graphics. I was pretty unimpressed until I actually put hands to Wiimote and tried it out. Then I was impressed.

What makes this game feel unique is both a direct and indirect result of using the remote to aim and fire. It isn't just because Wiimote aiming can make almost anything more fun: because the analog stick has been freed from the shackles of aiming control, it now moves your character. The Nunchuk stick allows quite a bit more freedom of movement than a directional pad, and Sin and Punishment 2 uses it, having you quite frequently dodging swarms of enemies and enemy fire (often while flying). It brings the S&P formula quite a bit closer to a bullet hell shoot-em-up. Since this is Treasure we're talking about, excitement may be appropriate. Especially because you still have melee attacks, so striking the proper balance between avoidance and melee range is probably going to be a big gameplay element.

Also, I'm not really sure, but the start screen - in which you can select one of two characters - makes it look a little like there might be two-player co-op. I'm not getting my hopes up, but that would kick some pretty heavy ass.

Progress: Gave Up

I didn't get as much face-time with New SMB Wii as I wanted - because it was pretty much the star of the show, even at NOA's mini-E3 employee event. Comparisons are being drawn to Four Swords Adventures, and those are pretty apt, but there are two big differences.

The first one is obvious: this is a platform game. Where an adventure like Zelda can get by with new dungeon puzzles and enemy encounters that get mixed up by having more heroes, a Mario game lives or dies purely by its level design. (Although now that I think about it, multiplayer boss battles sound like a blast.) The good news is that based on the stage select screen in the demo, you can expect a ton of level variety from this game, from fields and deserts to haunted mansions and oversized clock interiors.

The second difference, and I could be off about this, is that while FSA filled in your missing players with dummy Links, there's no such thing going on here. I can't imagine how there could be - since keeping four dudes in "formation" in a Mario game would basically be impossible, as would be moving one at a time and switching control between them.

This is an important point because it means the single-player game will be fundamentally different than the multiplayer one in how it plays; and possibly in how challenging the game can be made. The people I watched playing New SMB Wii weren't exactly great at it, but it still looked to lean toward the tough side, as if it was assuming that not everyone would make it to the end of the level.

So will the game be no fun in single-player? Will the level of challenge be capped, making certain levels trivial with four people? Or maybe - and this is almost purely speculation - there could be some sort of auto-tuning difficulty...?

When a game controls this well, it doesn't really have to do a lot else to differentiate itself from the crowd. High Voltage's biggest bullet point is "It's a Wii Shooter," and on that, they certainly deliver.

What surprised me about the demo though is how bad it looked. Not all around, but inconsistently. The game perhaps overuses full-screen blur effects, when you're injured, when there are explosions, when you zoom your scope in and out. But when the game isn't blurry, it actually looks really bad. Enemies are jagged monstrosities, blending in with the jagged morass of the surrounding environment.

I don't think the final game is actually supposed to look like this, though. It's coming out this month, so it must be gold by now - but I guess it's possible that the demo was from an old build.

Progress: Gave Up

Yes, keep your expectations in line with what you thought of Phantom Hourglass. Near as I can tell, the only notable differences are the Phantom and the train.

The Phantom, which looks like a wounded enemy Link might have picked up off the side of the road in PH, is a fun addition to the dungeon play - you can order him around to do stuff, like kill enemies you can't attack, or walk through lava while you hitch a ride on his helmet. His large presence on the screen makes the touch control a little less convenient than it used to be, but not so much that you can't get used to it. "Control multiple guys" puzzles are not new to Zelda, but they always result in really clever dungeon designs, and this implementation looks to satisfy.

The train, on the other hand, seems like a miss. Train segments play out in basically the same way as the boating from Phantom Hourglass. Except it's on, well ... rails. You can speed up, slow down, stop, reverse, and pick directions to go at rail intersections, but you're still stuck to a literally golden path. I'm thinking that at some point you must gain the ability to ride anywhere, because otherwise the map doesn't make a whole lot of sense; and taking away the free-roaming aspect of sailing doesn't really seem right either.

I guess another thing to mention is that the item I got in the demo required me to blow into the microphone to spew out some wind power. Looks like Spirit Tracks may be taking more advantage of the DS's extra hardware features than its predecessor did.

Supposedly a handheld take on the GTA formula, Cop: The Recruit certainly has the bullet points: driving, shooting, a free-roaming city, and I guess the plot is about crooked cops or something. But I kept shooting at pedestrians' heads, and all they did is run away. Then I stole a bus and started running over things. At no point did anyone react at all.

Not a clue what the game's mission objectives are, but if they want it to feel like GTA, Ubisoft's got a lot of designing to do. Without a world that reacts to your hijinks, a sandbox game is really more of a dry pavement game.

Progress: Gave Up

Final boss battle: awesome.

By the credits-slash-hilarious-music-video, I had been challenged, but not put out. Even in the later levels, I was usually able to win on my first attempt, though sometimes by the skin of my teeth. But after beating the final level, a slew of new stuff unlocks to push you even further.

This stuff includes replaying the full "adventure" mode with some handicaps; survival challenges from each of the game's settings; and more puzzles and mini-games, most of which I tried and some of which are really hard. Some of the final puzzles actually do become puzzle-like, in requiring you to figure out an exact sequence of actions to complete the stage. And the mini-games are always a riot, many of them parodying PopCap titles (like "Beghouled" and "Zombiquarium") or other games ("Portal Combat"). It's really impressive how the game manages to wrap itself around so many disparate gameplay concepts, and trying a new one is always a blast. Except "Beghouled Twist" - that sucked.

And there's a "Zen Garden" mode, where you can actually grow plants, to earn money. Or just for fun. It's a little esoteric.

On top of being a damn fun game, Plants vs. Zombies is absolutely loaded with content, content that I'd love to revisit at some point. This game is a victory for anyone who wishes they'd make 'em like they used to. Being funny doesn't hurt, either.

Progress: Silver trophy