My hard drive is on life support, which ruled out HL2 and Assassin's Creed (and though my old Powerbook can play Lich King, its aging hardware mars the experience somewhat). So I turned on my Wii and checked out what's new on the Nintendo Channel: a playable demo of The Fallen King, which I had heard some interesting facts about. Namely, that it uses Phantom Hourglass-like controls, which I was curious to see at work in another title.

Basically, Fallen King is classic sidescrolling Prince of Persia, plus Phantom Hourglass touch-to-move controls. Though the concept is simple, the execution falters because PoP's gameplay is fundamentally different from Zelda's. Where Link can get away with using a stylus to move and use items from an overhead view, using it to tell the Prince to jump and climb walls from a side perspective is more of a stretch, and makes vertical segments a tiring exercise in jamming the stylus in the general vicinity of a ledge.

The game's secondary character, some sort of floating magi, is basically a device for enabling new level design elements - but he's not used very well (at least in the demo). You "switch" to the magi by pressing any face button or any direction on the D-pad, at which point, instead of doing tap-to-move, you're touching points of interest to the magi on the screen. Touch a grapple point, and the Prince and the magi will grapple to it. Touch an explosive magic item, and you can drag it to a destination. Touch an enemy or empty area, and the magi will fire a magic bolt out, which stuns an enemy briefly but does no damage (e.g., the complexity of combat plateaus at stunning an enemy so that the Prince can take a free swipe).

The puzzles in the demo, involving pressure plates and rolling boulders, were more difficult than I'd expect from a free taste: which makes me hopeful that the final product could actually have some genuinely challenging puzzle-platform gameplay in it. But I'll likely never find out for sure, as the rest of the gameplay is too tedious for me to sit through again. Moving to a traditional button-based control scheme would be a good first step, but even then The Fallen King is depressingly similar to the original PoP, albeit with brighter colors and meaningless magi objects.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished three-minute demo

This game is the reason I need to change how the Glog handles video game titles/versions. And yet, I still haven't done it. Huh.

Forgive me, Gunpei, for I have renewed.

Last weekend I caved in to peer pressure, and found myself flung back into Azeroth. In the interest of playing with people I actually know, I've started a new character, and since I'm on a PvP server this time - and with the Horde - I'm seeing a lot of the old game I've never seen before. Which isn't to say it's terribly new and exciting; though the quests are different, now that I'm past the starting zones, the geography is becoming pretty familiar. The good great news is that the old-world levels have become all but trivial, with reduced leveling requirements, increased quest/kill rewards, and more content that has so far made the early levels a total cakewalk.

I also decided that I would make my new character a Frost mage, my previous record for holding a Frost spec lasting somewhere around five minutes. There is no shortage of Mages who extol the "control" virtues of Frost - but I had never been satisfied with its damage output, and though this has been improved in the past years, I find myself in a similar situation today. Nevertheless, I will continue the grand experiment for at least a few more levels, until the allure of raw Firepower consumes me completely.

The new achievements system is kind of cool, but, just as with Steam and Xbox Live - given that achievement "points" cannot be applied or redeemed for anything - it doesn't really add anything of value to the game. In 2008, implementing Achievements is less an "exciting feature" than a "me-too" marketing point, and frankly I would rather development time had been spent on something meaningful like ... I don't know, robots.

Meanwhile, my existing level 70 is languishing in the purgatory of his old server; I only logged in briefly to buy materials for, and construct, the Engineering flying mounts that had been introduced shortly after my last WoW outing. Northrend beckons, as does the Death Knight class, but I know if I don't get this new dude leveled now I might never have the compulsion to do it again.

Progress: Level 27

Nintendo Power, Volume 226 (9.0/10):

[...] the modified translation somehow feels less inspired then [sic] the original, and, like in the PlayStation version of the game, there is a brief lag after battles.

[...]

The rest of the review praises the game heavily, but purely for retaining the greatness of the SNES original. Ehhhhh...

Progress: Gave Up

Alright, you know what? Fuck planet Rilgar. There are two ways to go from the landing site - one to a near-impossible underwater gauntlet that stretches the limits of how fast you can move (without drowning), and another that goes to a series of rooms filled with stupid amounts of enemies that are impossible to survive because of the camera and weapon aim sucking (and the last checkpoint is ten minutes back!). I'm like a third of the way through the game, this sudden spike in difficulty is not cool. As much as I'd like to be able to say that I played through R&C to the end, this frustration is not fucking worth it.

Progress: Gave Up -- Fuck planet Rilgar

I've barely had any time to play with AC, but already it's a puzzling beast. What you might not know about the game if you haven't played it, or seen it played, is that the "game" proper - that is, what's depicted in the title and box art - is not the actual setting. Rather, Assassin's Creed actually tells the story of a man descended from a line of assassins, in the modern world, who is hooked up to a machine that examines his "genetic memory" - in order to play back the events of his ancestor, Altair.

This is a really interesting concept that, while not exactly brand new, is quite rare, and I would say has yet to be explored to the depth that it is here. The modern-era frame of the story has its own plot distinct from Altair's, though it revolves around uncovering the story of Altair's life through the memories. This gives the game tremendous liberty to skip uninteresting portions of Altair's story, fast-forwarding through boring head-back-to-town sequences and jumping from important event to important event.

It also has the dramatic effect of giving you a fellow audience to reflect with, in the form of the characters in the modern frame story. This story, while intriguing and significant in its own right, does a good job of not overshadowing Altair's. Which is not to say that it works perfectly: it does feel odd jumping in and out of Altair's time on whims other than the player's. Given that immersion is one of the highest goals of the modern game designer, Assassin's Creed takes a roundabout approach to it, in that you are immersed in the real world story by way of contrasting it with Altair's (provided you suspend your disbelief about the whole concept of "genetic memory").

Anyway, the setup is very interesting, and I'm really anxious to see it develop further. The gameplay... well, it's very technologically impressive - Assassin's Creed has some of the coolest AI techniques in the industry so far, with the way people react variously to you and your actions - but, at least at my early point in the game, I have yet to be wowed by it. The PC controls have taken a little getting used to, but I really don't think the story would be different on a console; button/key actions change frequently based on things like switching between high and low profile, or mounting a horse, or climbing, such that everything is very context sensitive. It may seem overwhelming, but one of the successes of the game is that simple actions are boiled down to the point where it's easy enough to get by without becoming absorbed in the deeper intricacies of the control scheme.

In general, AC is very well polished. The graphics and sound design are stellar, and the way the game works in general is very admirable given its complexity. So far my biggest complaint is that it's something of a chore to actually exit the game: from within an Altair memory, you must pause the Animus machine, choose a menu option to exit the machine, then pause your modern character's game, then go to the Profile (save file) Selection screen, then select a profile, and finally Exit to Windows (because, even after all that, there is no Exit option in the Profile Select screen). It's not exactly game-breaking (obviously a case of the PC port team faltering in the translation process), but with the rest of the game's attention to detail I wish they had paid a bit more to the ability to quit.

Progress: Memory Block 2

As the last part of the PS2's holy trinity of anthropomorphic 3D action-platformers, I had the highest expectations for Ratchet & Clank. First of all, there's a robot. Second of all, of the three franchises, Ratchet and Clank is the only one still going (and is also by far the most prolific). Third of all, of each of the franchises' developers, Insomniac has arguably the best reputation in other genres. So I was more than a little disappointed, a few levels into Ratchet & Clank, to find that it was just as underwhelming as Sly and Jak had been.

R&C suffers from the classical tragic flaw of Mario64-likes: bad controls. Ratchet's unique gimmick is the inclusion of a bevy of secondary weapons, mostly projectile affairs, but tacking third-person shooting onto a 3D platformer is just as disastrous here as it is in the rest of the genre. It goes without saying that the camera is a pain in the ass. Forget seeing what's behind or next to you - when you can barely see what's in front of you, trying to properly use the game's armaments is a sick joke. Blind, mindless fire is pretty much the only way out of encounters with multiple baddies.

It's somewhat depressing that, though the menus, map system, planet navigation, graphics and sound, writing and voice acting, and almost every other aspect of the game is very well-polished, the meat of it - running through levels and fighting bad dudes - is more frustrating than fun.

I'm probably being too hard on it. Like Jak, R&C is far from a terrible game. But I just feel so let down. On the upside, Clank is an awesome robot.

Progress: Planet Rilgar

HL2 keeps impressing me just enough to keep me playing. Ravenholm was a pretty hard push: it stretched the limits of my aim and ammo supply, as well as my tolerance for creepy noises and zombie shit leaping at my face. But despite the fucking annoying jumping headcrabs, I found myself slowly pushing forward, curious to see what lay ahead.

Part of the game's challenge is finding your way through an area - and I wish the level design made it clearer what bland corridor I should follow, or if I should run through an area as opposed to methodically scavenging it (enemies respawn in some areas, but not in all of them). The other part of the challenge is in shooting things, and though some things take more shooting than others, it's easy to enjoy the simple pleasures of trigger-happiness.

I could say that Half-Life 2 seems pretty good, as far as first-person shooters go, but that doesn't really mean a whole lot to me. Yeah it can be fun, yeah the challenge can be satisfying - but HL2 is not about to make me a bigger fan of shooters.

Progress: Highway 17

That was easy. After playing through what may be the shortest playable demo ever (four tutorial levels and two actual game levels), I'm now reconsidering dropping a measly $10 on Spectraball. The game mechanics are just as I'd hoped they would be, but Flashcube took the gameplay in a direction I really don't like: rather than go the Metroid Prime route and use the ball mode to find items and solve puzzles - emphasizing paced exploration - Spectraball's goal is to finish a stage as quickly as possible - emphasizing falling off the map.

Though there are glowing orbs (literally, "glorbs") to collect, and there's a remote chance that later stages incorporate some sort of puzzle dynamic, the game is, very clearly, primarily about going as fast as possible. There are even leaderboards for level completion speed; which, when the top times for the two demo stages are each under four seconds, seems pretty pointless.

Well, fuck.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished ultra-short demo

As much as I love Chrono Trigger, I am personally against buying things I already have. So I'm glad my new Nintendo Power gave a quick run-down of the DS remake's new features. Touch controls - sure, cool idea. Animated scenes from the Playstation remake? Meh. A "modified" translation, and a monster recruitment/battle feature? Blech.

But then they had to go and mention the new dungeons, and a new town. So much for my $[Chrono Trigger DS MSRP].

The extra dungeons are hardly a surprise, as they were hinted at when the game was first announced. But listen to this:

Halfway through the game, mysterious portals appear in prehistoric times and in the middle ages, both leading to an area called the Lost Sanctum. Consisting of a village, several field areas, and two full-fledged dungeons, the Lost Sanctum adds hours of fresh gameplay through multiple side quests that intertwine between the two areas.

Three additional Dimensional Vortex bonus dungeons open up once you've completed Chrono Trigger's main quest. We don't want to spoil everything, so we'll leave it at this: the dungeons feature new items, enemies, and bosses, and one of them even incorporates a fabled "lost" area that was reportedly planned for Chrono Trigger's initial release. Conquer all three Dimensional Vortices and you'll get the opportunity to square off against a brutal new final boss and witness a new ending (bringing the total ending count to more than 13).

!!!